According to the 2014 Application Troubleshooting Survey, conducted by Stackify, 37% of respondents rely on user notifications to identify issues, and many problems take more than a half day to rectify.
However, the survey also revealed that adoption of next generation unified application troubleshooting tools drastically improves response times and minimizes customer impact. The survey found that the most sophisticated companies used integrated tools to simplify and speed up the process of troubleshooting application issues.
Organizations which implemented integrated troubleshooting tools were able to identify and resolve issues without impacting their users in significantly less time than those using standalone tools only.
“In the past several years, applications have come to play a more centric part of many businesses, even those that traditionally were not software players,” said Matt Watson, founder and CEO of Stackify. “Until now, the evolution of application development has historically outpaced an organization’s ability to support and troubleshoot those very same applications – resulting in costly business disruptions as the root causes of issues were identified and resolved. Our survey shows that this is beginning to change.”
Key findings from the report include:
■ 85% of organizations are utilizing multiple internally developed applications, with more than one-third developing and supporting over 10 applications.
■ While logs and errors topped the list of data sources used to troubleshoot application issues, error aggregation tools fell behind infrastructure monitoring and notification tools in a list of the top tools.
■ Even with log management tools at the top of the list, a full one-third of organizations or more aren’t using any tools, making application troubleshooting largely a manual process of collecting and correlating error, log and supporting data.
■ While 46% of developers find out about application issues via application monitoring, 32% still find out from users calling the helpdesk.
■ For organizations using integrated tools, 46% of issues take only an hour to resolve, compared to only 32% of issues when using standalone tools.
■ Organizations with standalone troubleshooting tools cited that 52% of issues taking a half of a day to find the root cause, whereas those with integrated tools only cited 37%.
■ Organizations using integrated tools are able to resolve issues a full 80% of the time without impacting users, whereas those using standalone tools only do so 48% of the time.
The report is based on survey responses from 172 IT operations and development professionals around the world, across companies of all sizes.