App Environments To Grow 20% In 2012, Yet IT Ops And Dev Teams Aren't Ready

AppDynamics, the Java/.NET application performance management (APM) solution for highly distributed applications, has announced the results of its annual Application Performance Management survey. Based on the responses by over 250 IT operations and development professionals, the survey revealed the existence of a “perfect storm” on the horizon in terms of the growth of complex application environments, the relatively long Mean-Time-to-Resolution to resolve performance problems, and the overreliance on outdated tools such as log files during production firefights.

According to the survey:

Applications are heading for massive growth. Survey respondents indicated that they have a significant number of applications under their watch: over 40 percent have more than 10 mission-critical applications, with many being customer-facing and a surprising percentage (nearly 40 percent) processing more than 10,000 transactions a day. In addition, the need for agile release cycles is clearly the “new normal” with 85 percent of respondents participating in either multiple releases per year or even daily/weekly releases. At the same time, the majority of survey respondents expect to see growth in their environments in 10-25 percent range or even more throughout 2012.

Cloud is adding to the complexity. Nearly 50 percent of respondents plan to move 20 percent or more of their mission-critical applications to the cloud. This demonstrates the significant upswing in planned cloud adoption versus the same survey last year (where only around 15 percent were seriously considering the cloud in the design of their applications). 36 percent of respondents have begun architecting their new applications to fit the cloud.

Managing application performance has never been more difficult. Over 80 percent of respondents reported that they have experienced at least one Severity 1 problem in regards to mission-critical apps in the past 12 months, and over 50 percent have experienced five or more such problems.

Furthermore, the Mean-Time-to-Resolution to resolve these issues was not speedy: over 60 percent of respondents took longer than 2 hours to achieve problem resolution.
Despite all of this change and complexity, Application Teams are relying on log files for troubleshooting. Surprisingly, very few respondents—despite their general expectation for growth in their application environments throughout 2012—are using modern products designed for managing distributed applications. In fact, over 60 percent are using log files as their primary approach to application performance.