IT Organisations Progressing in Managing the Network for Application Performance But Legacy of Fault Management Lingers

LONDON, UK & AUSTIN, Texas – July 28, 2009 – The quest to find and fix networked application performance problems before end users are severely impacted is advancing, but obstacles remain. This is the conclusion of a State of Management survey report based on feedback from more than 300 network engineering, operations and management professionals and published today by Dr. Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler & Associates and NetQoS® Inc.

The survey was designed to assess how IT organisations manage application performance across corporate networks, based on the premise that the modern-day network management function should focus on performance before fault, starting with the end-user experience with a company’s key applications. The survey results show that while IT organisations have begun to focus on application performance, more needs to be done to effectively manage performance across increasingly complex and distributed networks:

• 93 percent of respondents indicated their organisation had either formally or informally identified a set of applications that are considered critical to the business. However, less than half of those surveyed (41%) indicated that the company’s business managers were significantly involved in identifying the critical applications.

• 75 percent of respondents said identifying the company’s critical applications has led to at least a moderate change in the way they design, manage and troubleshoot the network infrastructure, while 25 percent cited only a slight change or no significant change. The most common change cited was implementation or enhancement of quality of service (QoS) policies.

• 80 percent of respondents reported that their IT organisation has mapped the supporting network infrastructure components upon which key applications depend. These organisations are far more likely to focus their monitoring efforts either exclusively or primarily on these critical components than the non-critical ones.

• 50 percent of respondents indicated that they measure and report on the mean time to repair (MTTR) for a network or application outage. However, only 30 percent confirmed they actually measure and report on the MTTR for degraded application performance, revealing a continuing legacy of fault and availability management over performance management.

“Today, end users are more likely to notice application degradation before the IT organisation, but this research shows that IT professionals are focusing more on applications as a core part of their network performance management approach,” said Dr. Jim Metzler, vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates. “However, to move to a true performance-based approach, organisations must ensure they are supporting relevant business goals, tracking the right metrics, and implementing tools and processes to quickly respond to end-user issues, ideally before they are impacted.”

The State of Management report is a follow up to an article by Dr. Metzler entitled “The Mandate for a New Age MOM” and published as part of the NetQoS monthly series Performance-First Insights. This article identified a number of specific goals IT organisations must meet to effectively manage the network for application performance, including the need to:

• Discover all applications that are on the network and identify the handful of them that are the most critical to the running of the business.

• Baseline the performance and usage of the company’s primary IT resources.  Those resources are the most important business applications and the components of the IT infrastructure that support those applications.

• Implement tools and processes that allow the IT organisation to monitor the key performance metrics (e.g., response time, utilisation) of the company’s primary IT resources. 

• Implement the tools and processes that allow the IT organisation to quickly respond to a situation once it has impacted the end user. 

Upcoming editions of Performance-First Insights will analyse the results further, focusing on:

• Internal SLAs for networks and applications
• Proactive network management strategies and processes
• Network and application troubleshooting and tools