As the adoption rate of virtualization technology increases, organizations face new management challenges arising from hybrid physical and virtual infrastructures. While companies turn to virtualization to reduce IT expense and increase service capacity, a recent study conducted by NetIQ revealed that very few companies are taking the necessary steps to extend systems management basics to ensure application performance, service availability and end-user experience across this complex hybrid environment. As a result, they risk offsetting the many benefits and ultimate cost savings virtualization technology promises.

Comprised of feedback from over 1,000 respondents within more than 800 different government, enterprise and small-to-medium organizations worldwide, only 21 percent of 759 respondents currently deploying virtualization have any kind of systems management solution for their virtual infrastructure. Overall, survey responses demonstrate that:

• Approximately 27 percent are managing the performance and availability of their virtual systems with the same tools they utilize on their physical servers
• Just 17 percent are simply monitoring the virtual hardware or the operating system
• Only 10 percent are proactively gauging end-user response time while 15 percent are simply considering it

The survey also revealed that 40 percent of respondents are not reporting on the performance of their virtualized applications, hardware, operating systems, or their virtual machines in any measurable way. This prevents them from managing capacity, avoiding impending outages and collecting additional critical data that can help ensure business continuity.

By not extending application and end-user response time monitoring to virtual systems and hybrid environments, organizations have little visibility into IT service performance and limited accuracy in gauging an end users’ experience with those services. This limits the ability of IT to fulfill service level agreements (SLAs), threatens process continuity and minimizes the potential return on virtualization investments.

“It has been our experience, based upon the thousands of NetIQ® AppManager® customers we work with, that IT organizations that apply proven management capabilities – which includes the monitoring and management of application performance, end-user experience and the inter-dependence between the physical and virtual components – are able to fully realize the productivity and cost savings virtualization promises,” said Criss Scruggs, senior manager of Product Marketing at NetIQ. “Unfortunately, these recent survey results indicate that companies today are falling short and they will need to go back to the basics if they are to ultimately adopt virtualization technologies to achieve such benefits.”

Full survey results can be found here.