Many IT organizations have now established effective monitoring systems for the various infrastructure domains in an enterprise-wide IT landscape: servers, storage, network, peripherals and desktops. The management of application performance, however, is more complicated and does not yet reflect this maturity. There is no holistic view of application performance management and most IT Operations groups are not equipped to be proactive enough to anticipate issues before end users call the help desk.

Compuware Corporation commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey 389 global technology decision-makers actively involved in application performance management (APM) to assess the effectiveness of their processes and the technologies they employ. These decision-makers were asked about their application performance management processes, which technologies they used and the challenges they faced.

The findings include:

• IT is still taking a reactive, firefighting approach in its APM processes.
• IT lacks an understanding of the business impact of the issues, preventing them from assigning realistic priorities.
• Even if the fault domain of issues can be identified, itself a challenge for most IT organizations, there is a lack of diagnostic tools and processes to drill-down and analyze application performance effectively.