DevOps Pros Reveal Their Most Challenging Digital Performance Problems

SOASTA has released the results of a recent outreach survey conducted to determine common pain points and digital performance challenges facing the DevOps community, as well as a bonus question on their presidential candidate preferences.

The survey was fielded among 45,000 technology professionals and found that Bernie Sanders is a favorite with DevOps pros – 34 percent said they think Sanders would be the best president for the DevOps community, followed by Clinton (29 percent) and Trump (17 percent). 

On the technology front, the survey revealed that native mobile apps are creating the greatest performance monitoring challenges and that a majority of DevOps professionals thinks that all industries (38 percent), but especially retail (22 percent), could benefit from an all-in-one solution that combines real user monitoring (RUM), Synthetic monitoring and root cause diagnostics. 

When asked about technologies that were found to be creating performance monitoring challenges the survey revealed that the technologies giving DevOps 

professionals the most headaches are native mobile applications (38 percent), JavaScript errors (36 percent), single-page applications (25 percent), IoT (19 percent) and Google AMP (7 percent).

Sixty-two percent of the survey respondents said the top digital challenge their organization faces is reducing mean time to identify and remediate performance issues in production, and 61 percent say it is developing high-quality, high-performance web and mobile applications quickly. 

Another 45 percent say their greatest challenge is knowing how performance is impacting revenue and user experience, and another 44 percent said it is correlating metrics from various data sources and eliminating manual processes to reduce operational costs.

As for performance monitoring challenges, 58 percent indicated the biggest problem with today’s performance monitoring solutions is that the tools don’t provide root cause diagnostic and fix recommendations. 53 percent say there is too much focus on back-end performance instead of front-end performance, and 50 percent say there is no all-in-one solution combining RUM, Synthetic monitoring and root cause diagnostics.

When asked what the most important reason is to combine RUM and Synthetic monitoring, half (48 percent) said that it is important because Synthetic provides the best root cause analysis, and RUM tells them what it means to the user experience.  Another 41 percent said that it is important because Synthetic gives them the most detailed measurements, and RUM gives them the best coverage across all browsers, locations and pages.

When asked which industry most needs an all-in-one solution that combines RUM and Synthetic, 38 percent of the respondents say it is something all industries need. An additional 22 percent say retail, 12 percent say tech and 10 percent say finance.