Survey: Two in three IT professionals concerned about increasing complexity
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Munich, April 16, 2025 – IT professionals are struggling to keep pace with mounting complexity, putting IT infrastructure modernization at risk. This is a key takeaway from the "Rising to the challenge" survey conducted by IT monitoring specialist Checkmk.
As companies continue to accelerate the adoption of cloud services, containers, and serverless computing to stay competitive, IT teams are feeling the strain. According to the survey, 61% of IT professionals cite rising complexity as their biggest challenge – not only because it makes systems harder to control and increases cyber risks, but also due to mounting workloads. In fact, 80% say their tasks are becoming more complex, and 83% feel intense pressure to keep pace with rapid innovation.
Heavy workloads, IT skills gaps, and limited help from AI
Additional challenges, such as staffing shortages, are compounding the problem. One in two IT professionals report heavier workloads, often leading to rushed fixes. However, 59% admit that quick decisions sometimes cause new issues, making things worse in the long run.
Despite the hype around artificial intelligence, only 40% expect AI to significantly ease their daily workload. Meanwhile, the pressure to upskill remains high, with 94% saying they need to acquire new skills within the next 12 months to stay effective in their roles.
IT monitoring: a key to reducing downtime
As modern IT stacks become more complex and prone to failures, an overwhelming majority of respondents (94%) consider IT infrastructure monitoring essential to reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and ensuring agreed-upon service level objectives (SLOs). Log management follows at 72%, with application performance management at 64% and full-stack observability at 60%, as IT teams increasingly rely on tools and methods that provide deeper insights into system components and dependencies, aiming for end-to-end visibility. AI-driven monitoring remains at the bottom – for now.
However, the challenges outlined in the survey also impact IT monitoring itself. Half of IT professionals cite lack of knowledge as the second-biggest barrier to improving MTTR, right after IT complexity and ahead of visibility gaps.
Innovation at risk: the urgent need for action
The Checkmk survey highlights a growing concern: mounting IT complexity, combined with increasing time and resource constraints, threatens to overwhelm IT professionals and hinder innovation. Nearly half (49%) now see the IT skills shortage as the biggest obstacle to modernization, a 10-percentage-point increase in just two years.
A simple setup, intuitive workflows, high automation, and SaaS solutions help lower adoption barriers and lighten the load on IT teams.
One thing is clear: without greater efforts to support and relieve IT professionals, organizations will struggle to navigate digital transformation successfully.
About the Checkmk survey
The survey, "Rising to the challenge: how IT professionals can manage modern tech demands," gathered insights from 192 IT professionals across 27 countries. Respondents primarily work in IT operations, IT management, and IT consulting, with the majority based in Europe and North America.
Access the complete whitepaper with all survey findings here: Download whitepaper.
Media contact
Heike Link
heike.link@checkmk.com
Phone: +49 159 06546526
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.