According to the Fifth Annual State of the Network Study released by Network Instruments, 83% of IT professionals surveyed said problem number one with application management is “determining whether problems are caused by the network, the system or the application.”
The survey of 163 IT professionals looked at three main areas and this story is the third in a series on the study. Also identified as challenges for IT are delivering the bandwidth for video on the network and the management challenges that go with cloud computing.
Besides tracing the source of application problems, 36% of respondents cited handling user complaints and errors as a challenge, 34% mentioned monitoring bandwidth consumption, 33% cited measuring latency and other delay issues while 25% noted problems fixing bugs and applying patches.
“The primary concern that was being reported is being able to triage the issue, being able to determine what IT silo [is the problem],” says Charles Thompson, director of product strategy for Network Instruments. “IT organizations tend to be very siloed and troubleshooting these types of concerns can be a problem.”
Companies have used various network monitoring tools to get a handle on these problems, he says, but that increasingly they have found the need to also monitor operating systems, virtualization hypervisors, the physical hardware as well as the applications. Network performance management systems need to be combined with application management systems, he said, “to really correlate all those different components together so that you can very quickly identify which component is causing problems.”
A new report from Enterprise Management Associates,
Radar for Application Performance Management for Cloud Services: Q1 2012, finds that quite a large number of companies are very sophisticated in terms of deployment, but struggling as an industry with finding APM products that can deal with this kind of complexity. Many public cloud providers do not yet offer monitoring agents or APIs, which is hampering vendors' ability to build capabilities management into APM products, according to the report's author, Julie Craig, research director, application management, at EMA.
