eG Innovations released the results of its annual worldwide survey of over 150 IT operations professionals in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific on managing service performance in transformational IT environments. The key finding of the survey shows 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 also expect that management systems for their virtualized infrastructure be as automated, agile and easy to use as the virtualized infrastructure itself.

Management tools designed for physical environments are not only difficult to use, but are also not designed to handle the dynamic inter-dependencies in virtual infrastructures.

The eG Innovations 2012 study finds that IT operations are looking for new performance management practices and solutions in order to catch up with the pace of technology change and deal with these new priorities and challenges.

“Virtualization and cloud technologies render the traditional, manual approach to performance management inadequate,” said Karin Kelley, Analyst, Infrastructure Software, 451 Research. “To deliver on the ROI promise, today’s IT ops need to automate and accelerate the diagnosis and resolution of performance issues in dynamic and complex service environments."

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.

"Businesses are eager to reap the benefits of cloud computing and virtualization: increased agility, scalability and cost reduction,” said John Worthington, Director of Consulting, Third Sky.

“IT operations have to deliver the same or better end-user experience with fewer resources and less money. Process improvement and service definition are essential to long-term success, and customers who attempt to take a short-cut around these realities eventually face frustration. Organizations must find a way to do both process and service-oriented improvements in order to succeed in the new world."

Click here for the complete survey results