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Survey Says 80 Percent of Market Unhappy With Current Network Performance Management Tools

Enterprise IT is facing mounting challenges in tracking and delivering network performance, according to a new survey conducted by SevOne.

In a survey of 711 global IT managers at companies of various sizes and representing a variety of industries, nearly all – or 90 percent – say they do not have confidence in themselves to find problems before end users are impacted.

That lack of confidence stems from an inability to consistently and quickly detect problems. In fact, 30 percent of the respondents say they do not have a way to proactively detect problems, which often means they only find out about critical problems when end users complain.

Nearly half, or 40 percent, experience critical issues one to five times each month. About 19 percent experience critical issues five to ten times each month. Interestingly, 12 percent do not know how many critical issues they have each month.

On average, it takes five hours from the moment a critical problem occurs to detecting it, determining the problem’s cause and correcting, the study found.

The trouble stems from a lack of robust performance management tools, and that is reflected in the fact that 80 percent of the market is not happy with their current performance management offerings, according to the survey.

Respondents cite maintenance costs, scalability issues, complex usability, and a lack of real-time reporting as the problems with their existing performance management systems.

Many of these performance tools are legacy systems unable to keep up with or support newer technologies including IPv6, virtualization, cloud computing and enterprise mobility.

Only 41 percent of survey respondents feel their IT staff is extremely well educated or well educated on how to manage the new technologies, like IPv6, and their associated challenges.

Even fewer are ready for the impact of personal employee handheld devices, such as iPads and iPhones, on their corporate networks. In fact, close to 80% of IT is stressed and concerned about people bringing in their own devices to work, according to survey findings.

The survey was launched July 31 and concluded on August 3, and queried a variety of IT leaders. More than 75 percent of the respondents were individual network managers and administrators.

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Survey Says 80 Percent of Market Unhappy With Current Network Performance Management Tools

Enterprise IT is facing mounting challenges in tracking and delivering network performance, according to a new survey conducted by SevOne.

In a survey of 711 global IT managers at companies of various sizes and representing a variety of industries, nearly all – or 90 percent – say they do not have confidence in themselves to find problems before end users are impacted.

That lack of confidence stems from an inability to consistently and quickly detect problems. In fact, 30 percent of the respondents say they do not have a way to proactively detect problems, which often means they only find out about critical problems when end users complain.

Nearly half, or 40 percent, experience critical issues one to five times each month. About 19 percent experience critical issues five to ten times each month. Interestingly, 12 percent do not know how many critical issues they have each month.

On average, it takes five hours from the moment a critical problem occurs to detecting it, determining the problem’s cause and correcting, the study found.

The trouble stems from a lack of robust performance management tools, and that is reflected in the fact that 80 percent of the market is not happy with their current performance management offerings, according to the survey.

Respondents cite maintenance costs, scalability issues, complex usability, and a lack of real-time reporting as the problems with their existing performance management systems.

Many of these performance tools are legacy systems unable to keep up with or support newer technologies including IPv6, virtualization, cloud computing and enterprise mobility.

Only 41 percent of survey respondents feel their IT staff is extremely well educated or well educated on how to manage the new technologies, like IPv6, and their associated challenges.

Even fewer are ready for the impact of personal employee handheld devices, such as iPads and iPhones, on their corporate networks. In fact, close to 80% of IT is stressed and concerned about people bringing in their own devices to work, according to survey findings.

The survey was launched July 31 and concluded on August 3, and queried a variety of IT leaders. More than 75 percent of the respondents were individual network managers and administrators.

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Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

The gap is widening between what teams spend on observability tools and the value they receive amid surging data volumes and budget pressures, according to The Breaking Point for Observability Leaders, a report from Imply ...

Seamless shopping is a basic demand of today's boundaryless consumer — one with little patience for friction, limited tolerance for disconnected experiences and minimal hesitation in switching brands. Customers expect intuitive, highly personalized experiences and the ability to move effortlessly across physical and digital channels within the same journey. Failure to deliver can cost dearly ...

If your best engineers spend their days sorting tickets and resetting access, you are wasting talent. New global data shows that employees in the IT sector rank among the least motivated across industries. They're under a lot of pressure from many angles. Pressure to upskill and uncertainty around what agentic AI means for job security is creating anxiety. Meanwhile, these roles often function like an on-call job and require many repetitive tasks ...