The old saying "ignorance is bliss" doesn't apply to the myriad factors that can contribute to poor application and network performance. The less network managers know about the components in their environment that impact performance, the more likely they suffer unplanned outages, application performance degradation and costly network downtime. The problem is rooted in a lack of visibility into network and application performance, according to industry watchers. 

Aberdeen Research polled more than 200 organizations between May and June 2008 and found that nearly 60% of the organizations polled reported that they were not satisfied with the performance of business critical applications and survey respondents said issues with application performance are impacting corporate revenue by up to 9%.

The research firm in September surveyed 167 organizations to learn how they work to overcome the challenges associated with network and application performance. The good news is that 85% of those polled said they increased the amount of performance data collected in the past two years. More than half also reported decreasing the time required to troubleshoot network and application performance issues, and 41% said they improved their organization's success rate in preventing performance problems.

But the research also revealed that 44% of organizations that increased the data they collected didn't experience any improvements in their ability to prevent performance issues. Drilling down, Aberdeen learned that enterprise IT executives face many obstacles in their efforts to gain visibility into performance across their environment.

Forty-three percent of those polled in September said a primary obstacle involves an inability to identify performance bottlenecks before applications are deployed on the network. More than one-third identified monitoring analyzing network and application performance while also deploying a WAN optimization solution as a key challenge. More than one-quarter are challenged to find relevant and meaningful data when filtering through performance data. And 23% reported monitoring and analyzing network and application performance after conducting virtualization projects.

"[Organizations] are increasingly realizing the need to start gaining visibility into performance related issues before conducting new technology rollouts," the Aberdeen Group report The Value of Network and Application Visibility reads. "Organizations are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact that their WAN optimization and virtualization initiatives are having on the ability to achieve full visibility into network and application performance."

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.