eG Innovations released the 2012 performance survey report “Performance Management in Transformational IT Environments”. eG Innovations asked over 150 IT operations professionals in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific about their performance management preferences and thoughts. The survey results show that companies are having a hard time keeping up with the performance management requirements of virtualized IT infrastructures. Transformational IT technologies like virtualization and cloud computing are changing the way IT services are provisioned and delivered.

While these transformational IT technologies offer significant operational and cost benefits, they also make management of business services much more complex and challenging because of the dynamic nature of the infrastructure. IT operations expect that management systems for their virtualized infrastructure be as automated, agile and easy to use as the virtualized infrastructure itself.

Here are the key survey findings:

- IT operations professionals struggle to manually diagnose root cause problems in heterogeneous service environments – 54% of IT professionals surveyed said their single biggest performance management challenge is identifying the root cause of slow application performance in such heterogeneous environments. IT operations staff can’t tell where the root of the problem is when a user says performance is “slow”: Is it the Network? Server? Database? Virtual Machine? Today’s manual approach to troubleshooting performance issues is woefully inadequate in dealing with the complexity of transformational IT environments. In response, a majority of 67% would like to see performance management solutions that help them automate and accelerate the diagnosis and resolution of performance issues in heterogeneous service environments.

- Managing virtual and physical machines is a challenge – A very high percentage of respondents (53%) are looking for solutions that can manage performance of both virtual and physical machines, as well as the applications running on them, reflecting the new dynamics and inter-dependencies introduced by virtualization layers of IT environments.

- IT wants integrated performance monitoring across all infrastructure tiers – 60% of respondents say they are using multiple, independent performance monitoring tools today – one for the network, another for servers, another for the database and one for the virtualization tier. This fragmented silo approach does not work anymore, and an overwhelming 66% say they are looking for comprehensive solutions that provide answers to cross-layer performance issues.

- Poor service performance impacts customer satisfaction – The #1 business impact of poor IT service performance is decreased customer satisfaction say 53% of respondents. Decreased user productivity (44%) and an increase of IT operations cost (44%) as a result of IT performance issues are of major concern among IT operations professionals.

- IT operations professionals are looking for proactive problem solving – 63% of respondents are looking for performance management solutions that allow them to become more proactive and find problems before they impact the user experience.

Holger Schulze is Vice President, Marketing at eG Innovations.