BlueStripe Blog

Top 4 Application Management Challenges Plaguing IT Ops

We recently surveyed 126 IT Operations executives from the Fortune 1000 about their application management strategies. Their responses sent a clear message: IT Ops is on the hook for the performance of transactions and the systems they depend on, but to do so they need to overcome 4 key challenges:

1. It takes too long to resolve business-impacting problems

It's not that Operations teams are not up to the task of delivering business-critical services; the problem is that infrastructure complexity is growing out of control. We'll discuss this phenomenon in detail in next week's post.

The rise of this complexity causes the process of resolving user-impacting slowdowns and outages to take too long. In fact, complexity causes the next 3 problems, which are symptoms of the first.

• Traditional management tools do not provide a complete view of transactions and the systems they depend on
• So, IT Ops pieces together a picture by relying on costly, inefficient bridge calls
• Without a view of transactions and their supporting systems, Ops gets surprised that users are having problems—instead of catching them early

Let me explain:

2. Management tools only show part of the picture

Traditional tools report that transactions and applications are slow, or that a particular system is in trouble. They do not give Operations a simple way to see, in one place, how transactions are performing as they cross multiple systems, nor how each system is supporting the end user experience.

3. Dependence on bridge calls for firefighting

Because their toolsets don't provide a single view to cross-tier transactions and the systems they depend on, Ops doesn't have a complete picture of the application they're troubleshooting. To piece together the picture, they have to convene a bridge call with subject-matter experts (SMEs). Bridge calls are slow and costly: the search for group consensus among competing hunches prolongs the time it takes to troubleshoot, all the while wasting resources by drawing SMEs away from their work.

4. Reacting to users calling in instead of proactively resolving issues

Since IT Operations doesn't have a simple view to transactions and their supporting systems-and are instead relying on time-consuming bridge calls-Ops only has time to react to the latest user complaints. The time pressures force the team to depend on reboots and recycling app servers instead of finding and eliminating the root cause. Constantly reacting leaves the team unable to have any time to proactively solve emerging issues before users are significantly affected.

Transaction monitoring tools can help

For IT Ops teams suffering from these challenges, there is a solution. Transaction monitoring tools from BlueStripe can provide a simple, automatic view of transactions and the infrastructure they depend on. With this clear visibility, Ops can see where transactions get stuck and why problems are happening—overcoming the bridge calls and slow problem resolution that keeps them reacting to fires instead of proactively avoiding issues.

Stay tuned: next week, we'll discuss how infrastructure complexity is harming transaction performance and what you can do about it.

Click here to view the full survey results.

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