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.
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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.
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