Peter Sevcik and Rebecca Wetzel of consulting firm NetForecast recently came out with an article in Network World regarding some results from a survey of 300 companies which asked about application performance management. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll probably have already guessed that those survey results underscore a point we’ve been saying all along.
The article, entitled, “Four steps to application nirvana” makes a number of very good points points out that implementing a best-practices strategy leads to better application performance.
The survey results show extremely positive correlations between best practices benchmark scores and actual application performance delivered to the business.
On the whole, enterprises with excellent best practices deliver 100% better results to their users than those with poor practices.
Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Our survey results show that best practices exert their most dramatic effect on improving the time it takes enterprises to solve problems, with a 338% score improvement in problem-resolution time among those with best practices compared with their poorer-performing counterparts. …Those with the top best practices scores were more than twice as likely (144%) as those with poor scores to discover problems through systems vs. learning about them from users — and they were twice as likely (93%) to favorably assess the overall response times for their important applications.
In the article, Sevcik and Wetzel describe the four best practices as “Understand, measure, report, and link.” Of course, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense out of context, so they provide 12 ways to apply the four best practices. Which really makes it more like 12 best practices to me, but I’m not complaining, since it seems to work.
Another thing we really like about this survey: they ask what’s going wrong, as well as going right.
Finally, we asked enterprises to identify impediments to improving application performance. Insufficient cross-group collaboration, insufficient manpower, and lack of proper tools tie for the top of this year’s list of impediments with nearly 50% of respondents mentioning them.
Ahem.
More seriously, Sevcik and Wetzel – and isn’t that an awesome name for a 1920s vaudeville act? [Edit: I’ve been informed that I’ve been repeating my zingers…]– have put out a blog called “App Performance View” on Network World’s site and asked for user feedback on vendor products – including NetQoS Performance Center.
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