Current Enterprise Application Monitoring Tools Often Siloed and Underutilized by IT Organizations, Reports New Research

Press Release

  • Leading industry analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) surveyed nearly 300 IT Professionals in North America and Europe about application performance monitoring (APM) challenges

  • Enterprises under-investing in APM solutions; significant number of companies first learn about application issues via user complaint calls

  • Flexible deployment options, IaaS (infrastructure as a service) public cloud monitoring, and integrated application and infrastructure monitoring identified as the top APM “must-haves”

SAN FRANCISCO – JULY 15, 2015 – AppDynamics, a leading application intelligence company, today announced the release of a new enterprise application performance management (APM) study conducted by analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), which found that a majority of surveyed enterprises have eleven or more commercial tools in their arsenal to manage application performance. Nearly two-thirds of respondents report that it takes at least three hours to determine the root cause of performance issues; one-third report that it takes six or more hours to find the source of an issue.

EMA surveyed IT professionals from companies of all sizes across both North America and Europe; the majority were from companies with 1,000–9,999 employees, with 20 percent having fewer than 1,000 and 25 percent more than 10,000 employees. The survey examined the types of APM solutions currently in place; monitoring gaps; time and resources required to resolve application-based issues; and key features desired in APM solution purchases.

Overall,  EMA’s 2015 APM Tools Survey indicated that the lack of application-focused solutions appears to contribute to current IT challenges, with IT teams often trying to manage modern, complex applications with siloed tools and primarily manual processes. Specifically, the EMA study found:

  • Siloed and shelved monitoring tools: 65 percent of the companies surveyed indicated that they own more than 10 different commercial monitoring products. Nearly half also indicated that 50 percent or fewer of their purchased tools are actively being used.

  • Manual resources expended on application support: According to respondents, calls from users are the second-most frequent way IT organizations find out about application-related problems (27 percent cited detection by monitoring centers; 25 percent cited user calls). Line staff, those closest to the problem, report a significantly higher incidence, citing user calls as their first “heads up” 35 percent of the time.

  • Extensive people-hours required to solve a single application problem: IT organizations surveyed indicated that, for those application-related problems escalated beyond Level 1 support, mean time to repair (MTTR) is most often between five and seven hours; in addition, between three and four people are typically required to solve a given problem.

“Based on our findings, the majority of companies are still trying to manage complex applications with a combination of siloed tools, ‘all hands on deck’ interactive marathons, and tribal knowledge,” said Julie Craig, research director, application management at EMA. “The ability to automatically discover and manage the business transaction topology as the application itself changes is a significant challenge encountered by virtually every IT organization.”  

The Value of Flexible, Cross-Functional Monitoring Capabilities

In addition to EMA’s finding that most companies have under-invested in application-specific management tools, the survey also found clear purchasing preferences regarding future APM purchases:

  • Almost 75 percent identified “flexible deployment options” (supporting SaaS, on-premises, and/or hybrid deployments) as either “critical or important” factors for purchasing an APM solution.

  • More than70 percent identified the “ability to monitor infrastructure as a service (IaaS) public cloud” as either critical or important.

  • When asked about their top “must have” features for an APM product purchase, respondents selected the following:

    • #1 feature preference: An integrated monitoring platform consolidating application and infrastructure monitoring in one solution

    • #2 feature preference: Cloud-readiness features necessary to monitor/manage application components hosted in public cloud

    • #3 feature preference: Support for trending and reporting

To address the challenge of tracing and monitoring transactions through the entire application and infrastructure environment and proactively solve performance issues, AppDynamics recently introduced the APM industry’s first application-centric Unified Monitoring solution, as part of the latest version of its Application Intelligence Platform (v. 4.1), externally known as “AppDynamics Summer ‘15 Release.”

AppDynamics Unified Monitoring provides one unified platform, with one intuitive and consistent user interface and one product install; flexible deployment options;role-relevant views to support DevOps Monitoring & DevOps collaboration that gives teams situational awareness; and comprehensive application and infrastructure support for end-user client applications/browsers, application code, message queues, web services/APIs, databases, servers, containers, and third-party extensions.

“The EMA study validates that very few IT organizations have an accurate, comprehensive view of today’s complex application environment, business transactions and their dependencies.” said Kalyan Ramanathan, vice president of product marketing at AppDynamics. “Unified Monitoring is a new way to manage applications proactively, by tracing and monitoring transactions from the end user through the entire application and infrastructure environment to help quickly and proactively solve performance issues and ensure excellent user experience. Companies no longer need to waste valuable time and resources on a dozen different tools that will likely just collect dust on the shelf.”

EMA Survey Methodology

AppDynamics commissioned EMA to conduct a survey in May 2015 of nearly 300 IT professionals from small, midsized and large companies across both North America and Europe. For the purposes of the study, respondents were filtered to include only those actively involved in enterprise application development/management/delivery at the executive, middle manager, or "hands on" line staff levels.

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