SolarWinds announced the findings of SolarWinds Cloud Confessions 2020.
This year's survey of application owners, developers, and support
teams, inclusive of roles spanning cloud operations, DevOps, monitoring
engineering, and site reliability engineering (SRE), shows that while
application performance management (APM) has become mainstream with a
majority of tech pros using APM tools regularly, there's work to be done
to move beyond troubleshooting. The opportunity for tech pros lies in
fully leveraging the benefits of APM across the entire application
stack, so they can better communicate results to the organizations they
serve.
Nearly
nine in 10 tech pros use APM tools in their environments, whether
on-premises, hybrid, or in the cloud. However, respondents report their
highest confidence area in managing and monitoring applications is
troubleshooting. This is consistent with last year's findings,
in which nearly half of respondents said troubleshooting was a top
three task they managed daily. To move beyond troubleshooting, tech pros
cite a need for more training and education on which APM solutions best
suit their environments. According to the survey, tech pros also report
the need to develop skills in tracking APM impact across key business
metrics to maximize the value of their APM solutions and strategies.
"The Cloud Confessions results show that while APM has finally hit
mainstream, it's largely misunderstood and therefore underutilized. This
isn't surprising considering APM has typically been siloed across
DevOps and Operations teams without a holistic view of the application
code, supporting infrastructure, and end-user experience," said Jim
Hansen, vice president of products, application management, SolarWinds.
"To move beyond simply reactive troubleshooting, tech pros should
consider modern APM tools as the keystone to connecting these previously
siloed functions to gain comprehensive insight across the entire
application stack. When tech pros achieve this level of proactive
optimization with their APM tools, they'll feel more empowered in their
roles, in collaborating across teams, and in communicating results to
the business at large."
"The findings also underscore our belief that APM tools should be
simple, powerful, and affordable, enabling tech pros at any stage in
their APM journey to realize the value and richness of an APM strategy,"
added Hansen. "SolarWinds will continue to address the evolving APM
need through our deep connection to tech pros and the complex
environments and applications they support."
Key Findings
SolarWinds Cloud Confessions 2020: This survey explores how
extensively technology professionals are using APM tools, whether
on-premises or for SaaS-based application management, and how they
monitor these environments. It also showcases areas where tech pros feel
confident in their APM tools and strategies, as well as challenges and
avenues for building confidence. Key findings show:
1. Tech pros are using APM tools, employing a nearly even mix of SaaS
and on-premises to support the three architectures most often found in
modern environments. Despite this, confusion around which tools are
ideal for specific IT environments is consistent across application
owners, developers, and support team roles.
-
Nearly nine in 10 tech professionals are using APM tools in their environments.
-
59% are using APM for monolithic (traditional on-prem) app development architectures
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40% are using APM for N-tier service-oriented architectures
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39% are using APM for microservices
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The top three most commonly deployed tools in support of APM strategies are:
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Database monitoring (64%)
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Application monitoring (63%)
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Infrastructure monitoring (61%)
-
Two-fifths of tech pros face challenges due to lack of awareness of what
APM solutions are currently offered and confusion over which currently
offered APM solutions are best for their needs (respectively).
2. Overall, tech pros are confident in their ability to manage and
monitor applications on-prem, in hybrid environments, and in the cloud;
this confidence mostly sits within their ability to troubleshoot.
-
Over eight in 10 (84%) respondents are confident in their ability to
successfully manage application and infrastructure performance.
-
Two-fifths (40%) of tech pros surveyed are most confident
troubleshooting application issues and monitoring application
availability and performance (respectively) given their existing
skillset, followed by one-third (32%) of tech pros confident in
collaborating with team members.
-
Troubleshooting and monitoring as the top two areas where tech pros have the most confidence is consistent with last year's findings-in
2019, troubleshooting app issues was the number one activity tech pros
spent their time on, with 48% of respondents choosing this as a top
three task.
3. The largest challenges tech pros face when monitoring and managing
application and infrastructure performance relate to an existing
knowledge and skills-gap. As a result, tech pros have continued to deal
with the troubles of troubleshooting, despite nearly all using some type
of APM tool in the last 12 months.
-
When ranking the challenges, tech pros said:
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Lack of training for personnel was the top challenge (57%), followed by
lack of awareness of what APM solutions are currently offered (44%) and
confusion over which currently-offered APM solutions are best for our
needs (42%).
-
All other challenges were at, or under, the 30% rate.
-
Nearly eight in 10 (78%) tech pros report spending less than 10% of
their time proactively optimizing their environments (vs. reactively
maintaining).
-
In 2019, 77% of respondents reported spending the same amount of time on proactive optimization.
4. Tech pros value the business insights delivered from APM tools,
but greater skills development is needed in establishing KPIs and
communicating IT performance to the business.
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The top three business insights tech pros gain from APM tools include:
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Ability to prevent applications outages (73%)
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Ability to prevent app slowdown related to performance and/or capacity (63%)
-
Ability to improve user/customer experience (62%)
-
Tech pros are collecting these business metrics, but there's a need to
bridge the gap between business metrics collected and tech pros'
confidence in their ability to communicate performance to the business.
-
34% of tech pros feel they need to improve their current
skillset/ability to track impact across key business metrics in order to
more confidently manage their organization's IT environment, followed
by 30% of tech pros who feel they need to improve their current
skillset/ability to troubleshoot application issues, improve the
performance of application code (29%), and manage/ensure/improve
end-user performance (29%) (respectively).
The findings of this report are based on a survey fielded in November
2019, which yielded responses from 317 application owners, developers,
and support team professionals (practitioner, manager, and director
roles) in the U.S. and Canada from public- and private-sector small,
mid-size, and enterprise organizations. Respondents include 101
application owners, 108 developers, and 108 support team technology
professionals. For a full report on the survey findings, please visit https://pages.solarwinds.com/cloud confessions2020.