End-user organizations are looking to take more of a service-centric approach when managing IT performance, and management vendors, for the most part, have done a good job of adjusting to this trend. Recently, I had the chance to see a number of demos of IT performance monitoring products that are based on different underlining technologies for collecting performance data, are being sold to different job roles within the organization, and even competing in different markets, but they all had something in common. The first screen of their performance dashboards looks almost identical. And products that are based on network monitoring technologies, data center management or application monitoring all of a sudden have the same look and feel:

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One of the key questions in IT performance management is: Does an improved ability to collect more performance data generally lead to an improved performance of IT services? The answer is: No, not necessarily. Actually, a number of end-user organizations that I have spoken with reported that their ability to prevent and resolve performance issues deteriorated after they invested in additional monitoring tools. As new challenges of managing application performance “jump out”, organizations tend to deploy new point solutions that are addressing each of these problems. This does allow them to collect more information about these specific problems, but it doesn’t necessarily allow them to have  better control of the overall IT performance.

Managing application performance is one of the key IT initiatives for end-users, but there is not a single class of technology or solution provider that can address every single issue of managing the performance of business-critical applications. Some major IT management vendors are investing significant resources in acquiring companies to enhance their product offering and enable them to tackle more performance challenges. However, the capabilities needed for end-to-end management of IT performance are rapidly changing and companies that are looking to provide capabilities for addressing each of the major IT management challenges are likely to keep playing “catch-up”. End-user requirements are changing at a pace that is faster than product development cycles or times needed for acquisitions to be initiated, agreed on and completed. So, are organizations that are looking to access all relevant IT performance data through a single platform are out of luck?