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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

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 ...

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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 ...

In March, New Relic published the State of Observability for Media and Entertainment Report to share insights, data, and analysis into the adoption and business value of observability across the media and entertainment industry. Here are six key takeaways from the report ...

Regardless of their scale, business decisions often take time, effort, and a lot of back-and-forth discussion to reach any sort of actionable conclusion ... Any means of streamlining this process and getting from complex problems to optimal solutions more efficiently and reliably is key. How can organizations optimize their decision-making to save time and reduce excess effort from those involved? ...

As enterprises accelerate their cloud adoption strategies, CIOs are routinely exceeding their cloud budgets — a concern that's about to face additional pressure from an unexpected direction: uncertainty over semiconductor tariffs. The CIO Cloud Trends Survey & Report from Azul reveals the extent continued cloud investment despite cost overruns, and how organizations are attempting to bring spending under control ...

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