On the whole, IT managers are far from confident about the performance of their new applications: only a minority of our respondents said they would give a new application better than 50:50 odds of going live without any performance problems. While there may be an element of not wanting to tempt fate, their pessimism suggests that true APM benefits have not yet been realised. Indeed, over half of organisations said they experience unexpected performance issues in 20% or more of their newly deployed applications.

As we would have expected, formal APM methodologies, consistently applied, were associated with the lowest levels of performance problems in production systems. 44% of our respondents did have some kind of formal methodology in place, though in only 30% of cases was it consistently applied to all projects.