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IT Operations Unsatisfied with APM and BSM, Survey Says

More than half (63%) of senior IT operations executives are dissatisfied with their Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions, and 75% are dissatisfied with their Business Service Monitoring (BSM) solutions, according to a new BlueStripe survey of Fortune 500 companies.

While reasons vary, a common theme is the inability of these tools to keep pace with the make-up of applications both in the data center and within public and hybrid cloud environments.

Top reasons for dissatisfaction with APM tools, according to the survey, include an inability to support all applications or track all application components; metrics that are too developer-centric; difficult tool integration; and the simple fact that the tools do not actually help IT solve problems.

The problems cited with BSM tools include manpower requirements to keep service models up to date; lack of root cause analysis; too many alerts; difficult integration with other tools; and limited alerting for service level issues.

The survey highlighted three key trends in IT Operations:

- Current IT Operations processes for application monitoring and problem solving are both ineffective and manpower intensive

- IT Operations leaders are dissatisfied with their current set of performance monitoring and management tools

- Enterprise companies are hesitant to move mission-critical transactional applications to the cloud until processes and tools become more effective

“As companies continue to incorporate new technologies into their applications, the inability of conventional APM and BSM tools to keep up is taking its toll on IT Operations,” said Chris Neal, BlueStripe co-founder and CEO. “We were surprised to learn that in 2013, 81 percent of companies still have more than a quarter of their application issues go un-resolved, even with APM and BSM tools.”

Additional results from the survey:

- 68% of respondents reported failing to identify at least 1 in 10 business impacting incidents before users did

- 36% of respondents reported learning about more than 25% of problems from end user complaints

- Only 8% of respondents have a monitoring framework that both aggregates alerts and provides appropriate application and service level context for interpreting and acting on those alerts

- 92% of of respondents either have fragmented monitoring, using separate tools, or basic integrated monitoring, which does not correlate alerts to service level issues

- 52% of respondents reported that the standard process for fixing outages is a bridge call - which in large organizations can involve more than 50 individuals

- Companies using bridge calls as the primary approach reported the lowest success rates, with only 14% solving outages quickly

- Companies that used smaller teams for problem solving reported a greater success rate, with 29% able to solve outages quickly

Survey results also indicated a sharp contrast in attitudes regarding virtualization and private cloud versus public and hybrid cloud deployments for critical applications. In last year’s (January 2012) survey, IT Operations executives indicated that they viewed virtualization and private cloud as “just another technology” to be managed within their application architecture. The 2013 results build on this, showing widespread adoption of virtualization and private cloud.

In contrast, attitudes toward public and hybrid cloud among large company IT operations executives were distinctly skeptical. Despite the rapid growth of public cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, large companies are explicitly avoiding critical application deployments using public and hybrid cloud, in part due to the limited ability of APM and BSM tools to monitor and manage new technologies.

About the Survey

BlueStripe Software surveyed senior IT Operations executives at 166 large US-based companies in early 2013.

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IT Operations Unsatisfied with APM and BSM, Survey Says

More than half (63%) of senior IT operations executives are dissatisfied with their Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions, and 75% are dissatisfied with their Business Service Monitoring (BSM) solutions, according to a new BlueStripe survey of Fortune 500 companies.

While reasons vary, a common theme is the inability of these tools to keep pace with the make-up of applications both in the data center and within public and hybrid cloud environments.

Top reasons for dissatisfaction with APM tools, according to the survey, include an inability to support all applications or track all application components; metrics that are too developer-centric; difficult tool integration; and the simple fact that the tools do not actually help IT solve problems.

The problems cited with BSM tools include manpower requirements to keep service models up to date; lack of root cause analysis; too many alerts; difficult integration with other tools; and limited alerting for service level issues.

The survey highlighted three key trends in IT Operations:

- Current IT Operations processes for application monitoring and problem solving are both ineffective and manpower intensive

- IT Operations leaders are dissatisfied with their current set of performance monitoring and management tools

- Enterprise companies are hesitant to move mission-critical transactional applications to the cloud until processes and tools become more effective

“As companies continue to incorporate new technologies into their applications, the inability of conventional APM and BSM tools to keep up is taking its toll on IT Operations,” said Chris Neal, BlueStripe co-founder and CEO. “We were surprised to learn that in 2013, 81 percent of companies still have more than a quarter of their application issues go un-resolved, even with APM and BSM tools.”

Additional results from the survey:

- 68% of respondents reported failing to identify at least 1 in 10 business impacting incidents before users did

- 36% of respondents reported learning about more than 25% of problems from end user complaints

- Only 8% of respondents have a monitoring framework that both aggregates alerts and provides appropriate application and service level context for interpreting and acting on those alerts

- 92% of of respondents either have fragmented monitoring, using separate tools, or basic integrated monitoring, which does not correlate alerts to service level issues

- 52% of respondents reported that the standard process for fixing outages is a bridge call - which in large organizations can involve more than 50 individuals

- Companies using bridge calls as the primary approach reported the lowest success rates, with only 14% solving outages quickly

- Companies that used smaller teams for problem solving reported a greater success rate, with 29% able to solve outages quickly

Survey results also indicated a sharp contrast in attitudes regarding virtualization and private cloud versus public and hybrid cloud deployments for critical applications. In last year’s (January 2012) survey, IT Operations executives indicated that they viewed virtualization and private cloud as “just another technology” to be managed within their application architecture. The 2013 results build on this, showing widespread adoption of virtualization and private cloud.

In contrast, attitudes toward public and hybrid cloud among large company IT operations executives were distinctly skeptical. Despite the rapid growth of public cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, large companies are explicitly avoiding critical application deployments using public and hybrid cloud, in part due to the limited ability of APM and BSM tools to monitor and manage new technologies.

About the Survey

BlueStripe Software surveyed senior IT Operations executives at 166 large US-based companies in early 2013.

Hot Topics

The Latest

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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