More Data, Not Enough Administrators: New VividCortex Survey Reveals the Hidden Costs of Data Management in Today’s Complex Engineering Environments
Charlottesville, VA (PRWEB) December 15, 2016 -- VividCortex, the database monitoring company that helps businesses improve performance, availability and uptime, today announced the results of a survey analyzing how organizations are managing increasing volumes of critical data.
A barometer of the overall state of database management, the survey revealed that many organizations are having trouble keeping up with all the new data flowing through their technology stacks: 80% of respondents, for example, said they rely on teams of six people or fewer to manage data, even as the amount of data that teams manage is "doubling in size every two years." In addition, a quarter of respondents said they spend at least 20% of their time fixing performance problems instead of enhancing system performance.
These facts point to the largely hidden costs of managing large volumes of data inside organizations today. Any company that hopes to deliver an excellent user experience on its Web platform, e-commerce storefront or business application needs to recognize these hidden costs of data engineering, said Baron Schwartz, founder and CEO of VividCortex.
“Through this survey, database administrators, technical-ops engineers and data engineers are telling us the unmistakable truth: they’re spread too thin and don’t have effective tools to help them," Schwartz said. "And they’re telling us that it’s not just impacting their productivity, but the entire engineering team’s.” Schwartz added that this work overload may be contributing to job turnover among database engineers and managers, and more broadly points to the need for more automation and tooling to relieve some of the pressure.
VividCortex’s survey gathered insights from nearly 100 respondents, including database administrators (DBAs), developers, SysAdmin/Ops and executives/team leads, including 41 percent from companies with more than 200 employees. Participants reported that they manage a combination of server types within their organization, the most common being HTTP (Apache, Nginx Lighttpd), MySQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, and PostgreSQL.
Three key findings were:
- Data growth is dramatically outpacing headcount. Companies with over 50 employees still rely on relatively small teams to manage database requests. Nearly 80% of such companies rely on teams of six people or fewer. Yet, at the same time, the amount of data such companies manage is doubling every two years. Each individual DBA and SysAdmin shoulders a greater portion of responsibility for the workload, with fewer team members on-staff. As a result, they spend at least 25% of their work week devoted to server/database administration and related tasks, which amounts to approximately $50,000 per team member per year.
- Interruptions, inefficiencies, and slow problem resolution frequently undermine data management efforts. Nearly 25% of respondents said they spend at least 20% of their work week fixing performance problems instead of enhancing performance. Half of all DBAs report interruptions from developer requests at least three times per day, limiting productivity and making their jobs overwhelmingly reactive, instead of proactive.
- Engineering teams want solutions that will reduce diagnosis time and attack problems proactively. With database performance and availability critical to businesses' operations, 81% of survey respondents named reduced diagnosis time as a top need, followed by proactive performance management at 43%.
“Businesses that don’t prioritize giving their teams the support they need to succeed will inevitably pay the price in other ways,” Schwartz concluded. “The number of vendors and open-source projects for managing systems and their performance is huge, but many of these simply do not deliver real results. They were built for yesterday’s infrastructure, or they were built for DBAs but ignored developers, or they reinforce silos instead of embracing the DevOps philosophy—they fall short in many ways. Put simply, winning teams pick winning tools.”
About VividCortex
VividCortex is the best way to improve your database performance, efficiency, and uptime. It is a secure, cloud-hosted platform that eliminates your most critical APM visibility gap, providing deep insights into production database workload and query performance. VividCortex's patented algorithms measure the performance and resource consumption of every statement and transaction. It delves deeper than traditional monitoring solutions, which focus on vanity metrics and only capture a superficial, app-centric view. Industry-leading companies like Etsy, King, and GitHub use VividCortex to innovate with confidence, visualizing, anticipating, and fixing database performance problems before they impact customers. For more information, visit https://www.vividcortex.com or follow us on Twitter, @VividCortex.
Additional Resource:
eBook: The Hidden Costs of Data Engineering
Ryan Dunagan, VividCortex, http://www.vividcortex.com, +1 (434) 973-0894, [email protected]
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