IT shops lack the tools they need to perform triage and root-cause analysis of website application issues and the online customer experience could be suffering as a result, according to market researchers.

In a global survey of IT workers almost 90% understood the significant business impact of poorly performing online customer transactions, but 20% of them admitted they were unable to satisfactorily resolve these problems. 

Analysts at IDG reckon application performance management or APM software needs plays a more central role in the system management arsenal that is used to address these online customer experience issues.

APM software is used to monitor and manage the performance and service availability of software applications, and gives webmasters and administrators the ability to explore the inner workings of transactions to pinpoint and correct performance problems.

“It’s imperative that CIOs use APM to understand how their Web applications are performing,” said Prabhjot Singh, a VP with CA Inc and one of the survey’s sponsors. The use of application performance management software is common for web applications written to J2EE and Microsoft .Net platforms and most of the leading systems management vendors have J2EE and .Net APM products in their portfolios.

Applications have different characteristics and need to be implemented in a manner that optimises their performance. Respondents to the IDG survey most frequently associated APM with more effective processes for detecting performance problems and a faster mean time to resolution. 

This is particularly vital in a climate where customer satisfaction and retention are so important, the researchers said.

APM can provide insights on the end-user experience by collecting web traffic without having any effect on the operation of the site, or by using Javascript injected into a page to provide feedback from the browser.

The IDG research polled 400 IT professionals at organisations in the US, UK, Germany, Australia, China, Brazil and Mexico, with 21% of the respondents working at the C-level.