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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.

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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

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

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Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...