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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:

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.