IT professionals seek affordable network monitoring solutions. They’re not interested in trusting free tools to do the work. Nor do they need to pay a lot of money to get what they need.
How do we know this? Well, we talk to our customers a lot and listen to what they have to say. We also issued a survey through Redmond Magazine taken by more than 300 IT pros who work for organizations with 100+ employees. The survey focused on IT monitoring technology and related priorities.
Only 15 percent of all respondents use free IT monitoring tools, while 63 percent purchase them and install them onsite. Only 14 percent use IT monitoring software as a service.
When it came down to price, 65 percent noted it was “very important” in their decision making process because of a limited budget. 31 percent noted that price is “somewhat important”. These folks are willing to trade off functionality for price. Four percent don’t look at the price tag as long as the product gives them what they want. They might want to call IBM or CA.
We asked the IT pros to share their highest IT monitoring priorities:
- Consolidation of monitoring tools into a single view: 32%
- More sophisticated management of important applications: 26%
- Better control over bandwidth: 25%
- Better management of wireless networks: 16%
- All of the above: 40%
The last figure caught our attention. A good number of respondents considered tool consolidation, better application management, and better wireless control to be one single priority.
We also asked the pros to share their biggest IT monitoring headaches:
- Lack of a unified view: 30 %
- Getting the most out of their tools: 27%
- Coordinating information from different tools: 23%
- Isolating root cause: 10%
- Not an issue, IT monitoring is consolidated: 10%
You can’t underestimate the importance of a gaining a single view into your network.