NetForecast’s last application performance management (APM) best practices survey showed that those who follow the best application performance management practices experience much better application response times, faster performance problem resolution times, and improved application availability. They are also more likely to uncover application performance problems before users call the help desk, and the performance of their applications is more likely to meet their business needs.
As last Tuesday’s posting shows, a third of enterprises surveyed fared poorly with scores of less than three on a zero-to-ten scale, a middle third scored between three and five, while the top third scored above five. In examining correlations between best practice scores and how well applications actually operated and supported respondents’ business needs we found that:
- The lowest-scoring group almost always learns about application performance problems from users, not automated systems. In fact, the bottom group learns about performance problems from disgruntled users a whopping 86 percent of the time enterprises and from automated systems only 14 percent of the time.
- The top-scoring group learns about application performance problems from systems 43 percent of the time–a 28 percent improvement over the bottom group.
- The top-scoring group experiences 80 percent better results for time to correct application performance problems than the bottom group.
- There is a 50 percent improvement in the ability of the top group to deliver application performance that meets business needs than the bottom group.
- Only 6 percent of the bottom group believes they solve application performance problems faster than industry norms, compared to 28 percent of their top group counterparts–a 22 percent positive shift from the bottom to the top group.
- Seventy percent of the bottom group feels that problem correction times are unacceptably long, compared to only 12 percent of the top group–a 58 percent positive shift.
- Only 11 percent of the bottom group rates overall response times for important applications as excellent, compared to 32 percent for the top group–a 21 percent positive shift between the bottom and top groups.
- Twenty six percent of the bottom group says performance has improved over the past two years and now meets the needs of their business, compared to 54 percent of the top group–a 28 percent positive shift.
- Thirty percent of the bottom group says the performance of their business-critical applications has not met the needs of their business or has deteriorated so that it no longer meets their business needs. This compares to only 8 percent of the top group–a 22 percent positive shift from the bottom to the top group.
The correlation between APM best practices benchmarking and APM effectiveness is remarkable as the following figure shows. The top group’s APM best practices benchmark scores are 44 percent higher than those of the bottom group, and the top group’s overall application performance results are almost 50 percent better.
Our last survey results indicate that best practices will benefit your enterprise–and that it is a good idea to benchmark how well you perform them. We’re about to do the survey again and we will give you a chance to take part and we will share with you what this year’s results show.
