A recent study has claimed that, although many companies have invested heavily in leading performance monitoring applications, IT departments are simply switching off the systems because they are drowning in the data they generate.

According to a survey conducted by analysis software firm Netuitive, many firms are sacrificing system functionality because they are plagued by false or non-critical alerts.

As a result, administrators either set thresholds extremely high to avoid excess alerting or turn their monitoring tools off altogether despite the substantial investments in these products.

Over 40 per cent of respondents in larger organisations reported receiving 100 to as many as 5,000 alerts a day, of which at least half are false-positives.

Of the 195 IT organisations surveyed, 39 per cent said that they either intentionally set thresholds above optimum levels to avoid excess alerting, or turned off the alerting functionality completely.

This means that users are not reaping the benefits of their performance monitoring investments, according to the report, and are at risk of missing critical notifications that could avoid service degradations or outages.

Respondents reported that even diligent 'thresholding' failed to curb false alerts. Of those who devote 50 or more hours a quarter to thresholding, 43 per cent report that over half of their alerts are still false.

"Today's survey further validates the need for eliminating time consuming and error-prone manual thresholding," stated Nicola Sanna, chief executive and president of Netuitive.

The survey was based on telephone responses from 195 IT professionals with responsibility for managing leading performance monitoring systems in their organisations.