Almost half of all organizations say web issues affect end users

Many organizations have experienced negative customer-facing web issues, including downtime within the past year, according to a new study by Penton Research commissioned by IT management software provider SolarWinds.

Penton and SolarWinds surveyed 244 IT professionals worldwide in May and June, including 179 in North America, finding that 40 percent reported negative “customer-impacting digital experience issues” or downtime within the past year.

The most commonly experienced issues were slow performance (51 percent), end users being the first to discover issues (44 percent), difficulty troubleshooting customer experience issues (41 percent), and website or application downtime (34 percent).

More than 25 percent of the respondents said they were usually the last to know when end users were experiencing an issue, with only 16 percent reporting they were usually the first to know when such problems arose.

While 70 percent of respondents said their organizations are either in development or in early-stage implementation of digital experience monitoring (DEM) tools, only eight percent of respondents said their organizations were currently leveraging DEM, and just four percent said they’re “experts” on DEM.

“In today’s increasingly complex application environments, where users connect via a growing variety of devices and traverse a multitude of services within an app, quickly identifying when and where problems occur is key,” said Nancy Gohring, senior analyst, application and infrastructure performance, at 451 Research. “Providers of traditional (application performance management) solutions that can offer products capable of monitoring and improving the digital experience will be well positioned to serve the needs of businesses that are increasingly focused on the user experience.”