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Forrester Study Highlights Application Performance Challenges

Today's enterprises are powered by their applications, so ensuring those applications are available and performing well has become a key business initiative around the globe. However, this is easier said than done in the face of rapid IT change and innovation. Mobile users and devices, cloud-based infrastructures and applications, big data challenges, and the never-ending march of virtualization are all speed bumps along the road to successful and efficient IT and application delivery.  

In fact, it is so difficult to effectively manage application performance that a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Riverbed found of 159 IT professionals with direct responsibility for business-critical applications, 54 percent of those surveyed are unable to resolve more than 25 percent of their problems in less than 24 hours. And 31 percent have experienced issues that persist for a month or more.

Not unsurprisingly, Forrester found that slow application performance has a strong impact on enterprise efficiency. Business user productivity takes the biggest hit, but IT productivity loss is not far behind. Almost two-thirds (65 percent) of IT operations groups surveyed regularly spend between 10 to 30 percent of their IT operational resources on unplanned or unscheduled tasks due to infrastructure and application issues.

The good news is that IT operation groups are turning to performance management solutions to help them address these issues. An overwhelming 80 percent believe that performance management tools are important or very important in managing application performance.

Unfortunately,it is not that simple. While many organizations have performance management solutions in place, these solutions are often not meeting their complete needs. Companies frequently have too many tools that report on different consoles with no data normalization or time alignment between them, making it impossible to gain a holistic view of the problem, or they lack complete coverage/visibility in their environment.

Image removed.

Forrester noted that organizations are looking for a number of improvements from their performance management solutions, including:

- Enabling better cooperation and collaboration between IT teams

- Providing a single console for data presentation and analysis

- Earlier, more proactive alerting

- Analytics and correlation for advanced root cause determination

- Real-time mapping of application dependencies on infrastructure

To the survey respondents, transaction mapping, the ability to describe all the components used in delivering a specific transaction, is the cornerstone of an integrated application monitoring strategy, but it needs to be complemented with data collected across all components of the application environment.

Image removed.

This is because application problems can happen anywhere — out at the end user device, on the network, inside the infrastructure or in the application code. IT operations and dev teams need a performance management solution that provides visibility across the entire application delivery environment. They need intelligence into the end-user experience, application transactions and code, and network performance to quickly diagnose root cause before the business is impacted.

Merging application performance management and application-aware network performance management capabilities in the same dashboard, and applying a common language of application-related intelligence like transaction analysis, can streamline the interaction between IT operations and development. This type of cooperation and collaboration leads to significantly reduced troubleshooting time, and connects dev teams with their production environments to assist in healthy and efficient application lifecycle management. 

ABOUT Heidi Gabrielson

Heidi Gabrielson is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for the Riverbed Performance Management business unit.

Related Links:

www.riverbed.com

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Forrester Study Highlights Application Performance Challenges

Today's enterprises are powered by their applications, so ensuring those applications are available and performing well has become a key business initiative around the globe. However, this is easier said than done in the face of rapid IT change and innovation. Mobile users and devices, cloud-based infrastructures and applications, big data challenges, and the never-ending march of virtualization are all speed bumps along the road to successful and efficient IT and application delivery.  

In fact, it is so difficult to effectively manage application performance that a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Riverbed found of 159 IT professionals with direct responsibility for business-critical applications, 54 percent of those surveyed are unable to resolve more than 25 percent of their problems in less than 24 hours. And 31 percent have experienced issues that persist for a month or more.

Not unsurprisingly, Forrester found that slow application performance has a strong impact on enterprise efficiency. Business user productivity takes the biggest hit, but IT productivity loss is not far behind. Almost two-thirds (65 percent) of IT operations groups surveyed regularly spend between 10 to 30 percent of their IT operational resources on unplanned or unscheduled tasks due to infrastructure and application issues.

The good news is that IT operation groups are turning to performance management solutions to help them address these issues. An overwhelming 80 percent believe that performance management tools are important or very important in managing application performance.

Unfortunately,it is not that simple. While many organizations have performance management solutions in place, these solutions are often not meeting their complete needs. Companies frequently have too many tools that report on different consoles with no data normalization or time alignment between them, making it impossible to gain a holistic view of the problem, or they lack complete coverage/visibility in their environment.

Image removed.

Forrester noted that organizations are looking for a number of improvements from their performance management solutions, including:

- Enabling better cooperation and collaboration between IT teams

- Providing a single console for data presentation and analysis

- Earlier, more proactive alerting

- Analytics and correlation for advanced root cause determination

- Real-time mapping of application dependencies on infrastructure

To the survey respondents, transaction mapping, the ability to describe all the components used in delivering a specific transaction, is the cornerstone of an integrated application monitoring strategy, but it needs to be complemented with data collected across all components of the application environment.

Image removed.

This is because application problems can happen anywhere — out at the end user device, on the network, inside the infrastructure or in the application code. IT operations and dev teams need a performance management solution that provides visibility across the entire application delivery environment. They need intelligence into the end-user experience, application transactions and code, and network performance to quickly diagnose root cause before the business is impacted.

Merging application performance management and application-aware network performance management capabilities in the same dashboard, and applying a common language of application-related intelligence like transaction analysis, can streamline the interaction between IT operations and development. This type of cooperation and collaboration leads to significantly reduced troubleshooting time, and connects dev teams with their production environments to assist in healthy and efficient application lifecycle management. 

ABOUT Heidi Gabrielson

Heidi Gabrielson is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for the Riverbed Performance Management business unit.

Related Links:

www.riverbed.com

Hot Topics

The Latest

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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Broadcom

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Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Despite the frustrations, every engineer we spoke with ultimately affirmed the value and power of OpenTelemetry. The "sucks" moments are often the flip side of its greatest strengths ... Part 2 of this blog covers the powerful advantages and breakthroughs — the "OTel Rocks" moments ...

OpenTelemetry (OTel) arrived with a grand promise: a unified, vendor-neutral standard for observability data (traces, metrics, logs) that would free engineers from vendor lock-in and provide deeper insights into complex systems ... No powerful technology comes without its challenges, and OpenTelemetry is no exception. The engineers we spoke with were frank about the friction points they've encountered ...

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The power of Kubernetes lies in its ability to orchestrate containerized applications with unparalleled efficiency. Yet, this power comes at a cost: the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral nature of its architecture creates a monitoring challenge akin to tracking a constantly shifting, interconnected network of fleeting entities ... Due to the dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes, monitoring poses a substantial challenge for DevOps and platform engineers. Here are the primary obstacles ...