Stackify, the leader in innovative cloud-based application monitoring, performance and troubleshooting for developers and operations, today released the results of its 2014 Application Troubleshooting Survey. The survey showed that 37% of respondents rely on user notifications to identify issues, and many problems take more than a half day to rectify, but despite these alarming troubles, the survey also revealed that adoption of next generation unified application troubleshooting tools drastically improves response times and minimizes customer impact.

The survey, conducted to provide insight into how well application teams troubleshoot problems, what tools they use and what impact those tools have on resolving issues, found that the most sophisticated companies used integrated tools to simplify and speed up the process of troubleshooting application issues. Organizations which implemented integrated troubleshooting tools were able to identify and resolve issues without impacting their users in significantly less time than those using standalone tools only.

“In the past several years, applications have come to play a more centric part of many businesses, even those that traditionally were not software players,” said Matt Watson, founder and CEO of Stackify. “Until now, the evolution of application development has historically outpaced an organization’s ability to support and troubleshoot those very same applications – resulting in costly business disruptions as the root causes of issues were identified and resolved. Our survey shows that this is beginning to change.”

Key findings from the Stackify 2014 Application Troubleshooting Report include:

  • 85% of organizations are utilizing multiple internally developed applications, with more than one-third developing and supporting over 10 applications.
  • While logs and errors topped the list of data sources used to troubleshoot application issues, error aggregation tools fell behind infrastructure monitoring and notification tools in a list of the top tools.
  • Even with log management tools at the top of the list, a full one-third of organizations or more aren’t using any tools, making application troubleshooting largely a manual process of collecting and correlating error, log and supporting data.
  • Organizations with standalone troubleshooting tools cited that 52% of issues taking a half of a day to find the root cause, whereas those with integrated tools only cited 37%.
  • Organization using integrated tools are able to resolve issues a full 80% of the time without impacting users, whereas those using standalone tools only do so 48% of the time.

“Until organizations adopt integrated application troubleshooting solutions, they will continue to face the same challenges, attempting to solve application errors with little intelligence or insight into why and how errors occur,” Watson continued. “Stackify provides our customers with an all-in-one solution that significantly reduces the impact of application errors.”

The Stackify 2014 Application Troubleshooting Report is based on survey responses from 172 IT operations and development professionals around the world, across companies of all sizes, making it a comprehensive look at the state of application troubleshooting today. The full report is available for free here.