New EMA Report: Legacy Network Monitoring Tools Fail to Meet Cloud Demands

According to a recent study by EMA—an internationally recognized authority on IT and data management—about 75 % of network managers surveyed feel that their current network performance monitoring (NPM) tools are inadequate for the public cloud.

Only 25 % of respondents believe the solutions they use fully address their cloud‑monitoring needs, and nearly 40 % have had to seek third‑party tools to fill visibility gaps.

More than a third (35 %) of teams were so dissatisfied that they built or heavily customized their own monitoring solutions instead of looking for a ready‑made product.

Why are enterprises still relying on legacy tools that were not designed for the cloud? The core issue is the lack of continuous improvement. Forty‑five percent of the survey participants said they would need to purchase extra licenses or modules as they migrated to the cloud.

“Due to complacency and limitations of the software itself, we had to get rid of [a tool]… It’s not worth the time and investment,” one IT executive told EMA. “We didn’t want to spend more money on a new version that was just a redux of an older version. I didn’t see any real progress in the product.”

In addition, 28 % of network teams reported that their vendors had not even provided a clear roadmap for cloud monitoring—a shortfall that would have been unacceptable a decade ago and is unacceptable today.

Consequently, many organizations are layering additional monitoring and management tools to bridge the gap between legacy systems and the cloud. However, a fragmented toolset can create its own problems, requiring extra monitoring, quality assurance, and potentially delivering confusing, convoluted insights.

The solution lies in adopting a comprehensive, cloud‑native NPM platform that delivers a unified view of performance across all network environments—on‑prem, hybrid, and public cloud. A single pane of glass eliminates the need to juggle multiple dashboards and reduces the risk of overspending on piecemeal upgrades.

AppNeta Performance Manager is designed for this purpose. By combining active and passive testing that follows application delivery hop‑by‑hop—from the cloud to remote offices—it provides real‑time visibility into user experience without overloading network capacity. Central IT teams can pinpoint issues before they affect end users, regardless of where those users are located.

For more information, visit AppNeta Performance Manager.