Top Troubleshooting Surprises from Survey at CiscoLive 2025

Problem resolution in modern enterprises has never been more complex. Not only is the multivendor nature of hybrid/multicloud infrastructure challenging to the IT staff, but so too are the kinds of problems facing enterprises. In July 2024, many enterprises were surprised by the impact of the CrowdStrike outage on their IT environments. Services were disrupted and, in many cases, unavailable for a day or more—impacting customers, revenue, service, and employee productivity. IT staff impact was significant as well, in some cases sending team members or contractors to remote locations to restore the offices to operation.

We were reminded again of the fragility of performance and availability in June 2025 when Google Cloud experienced a rather lengthy performance disruption of its own. Remote offices have a particular vulnerability when these issues arise, because most of them lack skilled IT professionals on-site. So, when problems occur (not “if” but “when”), identifying, troubleshooting, and resolving them typically is left to centralized IT professionals.

Complex, multivendor environments, combined with the lack of eyes, ears, and hands at the remote site, can mean unacceptable incident resolution times.

Observability Survey: CiscoLive 2025

To understand what is really happening inside enterprise operations teams, NETSCOUT conducted a survey at CiscoLive 2025 with vetted IT professionals, all 319 of them actively involved in problem resolution processes. Unless otherwise noted, the data presented in this blog is from respondents to this survey.

How Problems Are Discovered: Surprise #1

In EMA’s study “Network Management Megatrends 2024,” approximately 68 percent of the respondents indicated that their organization had between 4 and 15 tools to manage, monitor, and troubleshoot their network for identifying and resolving degradations and outages. Some would call this proof of tool clutter.

Despite pervasive complaints of tool clutter for network and performance management today, we were surprised when the CiscoLive survey revealed that more than half (50.8 percent) of respondents discover performance problems when employees report them to IT or the help desk (see Figure 1). And this jumps to almost 62 percent (61.8 percent) for IT executive leaders’ responses in the survey (see Figure 2). Clearly, this is inefficient! By the time users are reporting the problem, it is already too late. Revenue, customer service, and employee productivity have already been affected, forcing teams to rely on costly workarounds.

Figure 1: More than half (50.8 percent) of all respondents discover performance problems when employees report them to the IT/help desk.

Even worse, customers may know and feel the impact of the disruption at this point. Further corporate damage may be unavoidable if customer loyalty and trust are lost, if the disruption trends on social media, or if the issue raises regulatory concerns.

Figure 2: Nearly 62 percent of IT leaders revealed that it is their users who are the first to report a new problem, not a vendor tool or one they have in their own network.

How Long Does Problem Solving Take?

In our survey, we were very interested in how long it takes organizations to solve problems, to get a sense of the impact on their user community during that “down” time or disrupted period. We looked specifically at the data of respondents from companies of 10,000 or more employees who reported that just under 17 percent (16.7 percent) were resolving performance problems in a very admirable few minutes. This means their employees and customers would barely be impacted by these “blips” in performance or availability of business-critical services (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Respondents answered the question on how much time it takes IT in their organization to completely resolve problems.

However, the clear majority of respondents revealed that in 81 percent of cases, IT required a few hours or more to resolve issues in their environment. Anything longer than a few minutes will impact users. The longer a problem persists, the more people are affected, and the more likely other parts of the business will suffer.

Impact of Lengthy Outages

In reviewing the breakdown of the respondents’ answers, 56 percent of the time, those in companies with 10,000 or more employees indicated it took a few hours to solve the problems. A few hours to resolve a network or application problem might be perfectly sufficient. But when considered from a business perspective, that may also seem like forever to an end user.

Consider the ramifications:

• Not having access to your software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise resource management application for even a few hours can significantly impact sales transactions and damage the bottom line.
• Lack of availability or poor-quality conferencing tools to meet with colleagues, vendors, or clients could have serious productivity implications.
• Not having a contact center available to customers for a few hours could have significant customer satisfaction implications.

When it takes an extended period of time to resolve issues with business-critical solutions, the entire business can be disrupted, which has real revenue, cost, reputation, and productivity implications.

How Long Is Too Long to Resolve Problems? Surprise #2

We were surprised by the responses of the IT executives who reported that 25.3 percent of the time it takes between a day and a week or more to solve problems. Similar business risks exist with this situation as with those outlined for outages of a few hours. However, the costs are higher, the amount of revenue lost is higher, the potential for customer churn is multiplied, and the enterprise’s reputation is likely to take a more significant hit as users vent their frustrations via negative reviews and complaints on social media platforms.

Bottom line, this is simply unacceptable, but also unnecessary today when tools and solutions exist that can help reduce the time to identify, pinpoint the source, and resolve these issues. NETSCOUT solutions for observability will help organizations looking for ways to speed notification of emerging problems and reduce the time to troubleshoot and resolve them.

Learn more about how NETSCOUT solutions for observability will help organizations looking for ways to speed notification of emerging problems and reduce the time to troubleshoot and resolve them.