Trends in IT Ops 2021: Remote working and automation are key topics
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Hybrid environments are the reality for most sysadmins
Munich, Germany - November 03, 2021 - tribe29, the company behind the Checkmk IT monitoring solution, presents the 'Trends in IT Ops 2021 Survey' results. In this survey, more than 160 sysadmins and other IT professionals from organizations worldwide have provided their input on the latest trends in IT monitoring and technology.
The survey reveals that cloud technologies are now firmly entrenched, with 79% expecting that monitoring cloud assets will become more or much more important in the future. However, physical infrastructure remains a critical part of an overall technology strategy, with 43% of respondents believing that monitoring physical infrastructure will become more or much more important. 45% responded that monitoring physical infrastructure will stay at the same level of importance.
Cloud computing is one of many technologies IT and infrastructure teams now need to monitor. The survey also revealed that containers continue to be a growth area, with 49% of respondents finding that containers and container management technologies have been relevant or very relevant to them in the past year. In addition, 73% of participants point out that monitoring containers will be more or much more important in the future.
Our survey highlights the reality of hybrid IT; A predictably strong growth in cloud and container technologies coupled with the continued relevance of on-premises systems to deliver critical business applications. IT monitoring tools need to provide a cohesive view into an increasingly heterogeneous technology stack.
The survey also revealed that sysadmins increasingly involve themselves in application performance monitoring (APM), with 81% seeing this as being more or much more important in the future.
When we asked respondents which are currently the most important tools in their role, the two most common responses were infrastructure automation and configuration tooling and virtualization. Nine out of ten respondents see tools in these areas as relevant or very relevant to their role. An especially topical response was seen in preparing organizations for remote work. In this area, projects involving deployment automation and configuration management were seen as important. 81% of all participants stated that these were relevant or very relevant while their companies were shifting to remote work over the last 12 months.
The survey data also demonstrates that network management continues to be hugely significant. When asked about the most important tools for their role, 81% of participants stated that tools for network management are relevant or very relevant.
Most IT infrastructure ready for remote work
Most sysadmins seemed to have dealt relatively well adapting their organization's IT infrastructure to allow the workforce to work from home during the Covid-19 pandemic. When asked if their IT infrastructure was prepared for remote work, 56% of participants responded that they had had no problems, and a mere 4% had needed to rebuild their infrastructure from scratch. Additionally, the Covid-19 pandemic seemed to have had only a moderate impact on sysadmin's daily work. Exactly half of all participants said that the pandemic affected their work slightly, with a quarter stating that their work has not been affected at all.
The survey found two major camps on the respondents' level of support for a transition to a fully remote workforce. The most common answer, with 35%, is the sysadmins who say that working from home, or other remote location, was a good decision. The other group was indifferent, with slightly fewer participants (34%) stating that remote work is neither good nor bad. Only 4% said that they do not support the transition to working remotely at all.
I am glad that sysadmins worldwide were a key driver in helping our societies make the shift into remote work possible. We owe them all a big thank you. In return, we, as providers of modern IT monitoring solutions, need to continue providing them with the best tools to master the challenges of monitoring increasingly complex hybrid environments.
The IT Ops Trends Survey and was conducted online in July and August 2021. We are incredibly grateful to the 161 participants around the globe who took part.
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Checkmk GmbH
press@checkmk.com
Tel: +49 89 998209700
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About Checkmk
Checkmk’s mission is to enable IT infrastructures and applications to run in any organization at peak performance. That’s why we built Checkmk, the monitoring platform for every aspect of modern IT environments.
Checkmk is the platform of your open observability ecosystem. It combines enterprise-grade scalability and security with the extensibility of open source software. It integrates seamlessly with other enterprise applications and provides powerful features to automate monitoring workflows.
Tens of thousands of users in more than 50 countries rely on Checkmk to ensure high availability and best performance of their systems. With Checkmk, organizations prevent issues before they happen or trigger fast remediation actions when failures occur.