AppDynamics hired Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) to produce a study about why the enterprise is plagued with numerous commercial monitoring applications that are not in use. According to AppDynamics, the enterprise is encumbered with disparate applications, resulting in vast challenges for IT teams including underperformance, monitoring gaps, and siloed tools—not to mention that many IT managers do not have time to address these application-based issues.
AppDynamics emphasizes what it identifies as a finding that almost two-thirds of respondents report that it takes at least three hours to determine the root cause of an application performance issue. AppDynamics concludes that very few IT organizations have an accurate, comprehensive view of today’s complex applications environment, business transactions, and dependencies.
DevOps.com spoke with AppDynamics’ VP of Product Marketing, Kalyan Ramanathan about this study.
DevOps.com: How did you select and reach study participants?
Kalyan Ramanathan: We worked with the analysts from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) to do this survey and study. They have a standard database of people who they always work with, who they interact with. EMA did the heavy lifting, surveying the audience for the study. We did, however, put criteria in place in order to make sure that the survey is relevant.
We made sure that the survey targeted enterprises of all sizes. So as you may have read, 80-percent of the surveyed respondents had more than a thousand employees, which is about the size where companies start to have some mission-critical applications that might affect a substantial number of either internal employees or consumers when they don’t work well.
We also wanted a smattering of fairly large customers, or I should say enterprises, only because the challenges that people at that spectrum have are very different from let’s say an enterprise with a thousand employees. So 25-percent of the surveyed respondents had more than 10K employees.
The other thing that we did as a part of the survey was to focus on the personas that we are talking to, so that again we get good representation across the board. So we had everybody from practitioners to managers to IT execs in this survey because the interesting thing that we found out is that there are some questions where we see a fairly wide discrepancy between these personas.
DevOps: You say that the survey shows that respondents need flexible deployment options. Did respondents say why in particular they needed flexible deployment options?
Kalyan Ramanathan: Absolutely, and I think you’re specifically referring to the fact that the solution can be available on premise or in the cloud, and just about every enterprise that we talked to believes that this is a key requirement and it has become a key differentiator for AppDynamics in the market. Many of the companies that we talked to are, I would say, Fortune 1,000 to Fortune 2,000 companies, and in these companies not all their assets are in the cloud today, not all their applications are in the cloud today, and they also deal with a lot of sensitive data.
So today many of them may choose to work with our on-premise solution, but at the same time I think the writing’s on the wall. I think none of us can question the fact that the cloud is indeed gaining acceptance and that some or many of these applications will indeed go to the cloud at some point. So having that option, having the flexibility that one day my applications will go to the cloud and therefore I could use a cloud-based monitoring solution, without doing a forklift upgrade or replacement of everything that I have, is indeed a good flexibility to have and that’s essentially what our customers see in the AppDynamics product.
Final Thoughts
Consider this exchange, dear reader, as enlightenment into what went into this study or as a backdrop for your examination of the published survey results from AppDynamics if you care to read them. You can get the full study here.