Is digital performance getting too cloudy?

According to a global study from Dynatrace, 76 percent of the of 800 CIOs surveyed think the complexity caused by modern, cloud-centric ecosystems could soon make it impossible to manage digital performance efficiently. The survey found that a single web or mobile transaction now crosses an average of 35 different technology systems or components, compared to 22 just five years ago. Fifty-three percent of CIOs plan to deploy more technologies in the next 12 months, and the technologies they plan to adopt — multi-cloud (95 percent), microservices (88 percent) and containers (86 percent) — are likely to heighten complexities:

• Seventy-six percent of CIOs say multi-cloud makes it especially difficult and time-consuming to monitor and understand the impact that cloud services have on the user-experience;
• Seventy-two percent are frustrated that IT has to spend so much time setting-up monitoring for different cloud environments when deploying new services;
• Seventy-two percent say monitoring the performance of microservices in real-time is almost impossible;
• Maintaining and configuring performance monitoring (56 percent) and identifying service dependencies and interactions (54 percent) are the top challenges CIOs identify with managing microservices and containers.

As a result of the mounting complexity, IT teams now spend an average of 29 percent of their time dealing with digital performance problems. As CIOs search for a solution to these challenges, four in five (81 percent) CIOs said they think artificial intelligence (AI) will be critical to IT's ability to master increasing complexity. Eighty-three percent are either already deploying or planning to deploy AI in the next 12 months. “You can’t rely on humans to synthesize and analyze data anymore, nor a bag of independent tools,” said Matthias Scharer, VP of business operations, Dynatrace, in a statement. “You need to be able to auto detect and instrument these environments in real time, and most importantly use AI to pinpoint problems with precision and set your environment on a path of auto-remediation to ensure optimal performance and experience from an end users’ perspective.”