Survey Reveals IT Admins Have Room for APM Improvement

Any IT admin worth their salt will tell you that the only thing better than solving an IT ticket is keeping it from ever being raised. After all, prevention is better than a cure.

So how do you preempt performance problems in an enterprise IT environment? That’s simple - use an application performance management (APM) solution. But, as we recently found out, around 40 percent of IT admins do not use an APM solution to monitor their applications!

An IT admin’s worst nightmare, by far, is having an end user report an app performance issue. Quite alarmingly, 32 percent of IT admins still discover problems only after being alerted by end users!

These, and others, were the findings of the recently concluded Application Performance Management survey by ManageEngine. The intention of the survey was to derive crucial insight about the state of APM adoption and related technologies across the industry and their effectiveness in solving IT operations problems on a daily basis.

The survey focused on the following: Cloud adoption, end-user satisfaction, APM penetration and time to resolution

1. Private cloud is the preferred choice. A whopping 50 percent of the respondents preferred the private cloud. However, the preference for public and hybrid clouds (each garnered 20 percent) is on the rise as well.

2. Web interface is the dominant mode of application access. In fact, 70 percent of the users reportedly access their applications through the Web, while just 17 percent use the mobile version of enterprise apps.

3. APM penetration is at 60 percent. This was based on the number of users who employed an APM solution to monitor at least half of their applications. That is, APM solutions can definitely go a lot further toward being the go-to tools for IT admins throughout the industry. Also, 59 percent depend on an APM solution to discover problems.

4. APM for end-user satisfaction. Here’s the good news - 68 percent believe an APM solution resulted in higher end-user satisfaction. We might be able to put a finger on why end-user satisfaction levels couldn’t be higher - the 32 percent of IT admins who participated say end users are the ones discovering and reporting application problems! This is definitely an area where APM solutions can improve to ensure that no application performance land mines go undetected.

The results of the survey show that even though organizations recognize the overall usefulness of APM solutions, most organizations still haven’t deployed monitoring effectively enough. End users still report a high percentage of performance problems. Businesses are spending a lot of time, money and resources to find and fix application outages and other performance issues.

Going forward, each enterprise needs to take a cold, hard look at its APM solution and calculate the real value it delivers, factoring in the scope of the solution’s functionality and coverage. Many enterprises will no doubt find that they will be better served by upgrading their monitoring capabilities by adopting comprehensive solutions that are easy to deploy and maintain and do not require expert management.