29 June 2015
Today’s performance monitoring questions are not so much new, as they are harder and more urgent to answer than ever before.
The sheer number of hardware and software elements that make up critical business services for the modern organisation, and the fact these span numerous networks, make for an IT infrastructure of unprecedented complexity and scale.
This environment means that it is all too likely the only answer available when systems are slowing down or failing completely is: “I don’t know.”
In an era when the performance, or not, of IT infrastructure is more tightly linked to the performance of the business than ever before, such a response is unlikely to be welcomed.
When things go wrong – perhaps complaints from users or customers, VoIP capacity running out, response times spiking intermittently and unpredictably – the scramble for answers begins.
The “war room” response is familiar to anyone in Network Operations: a face-to-face meeting combined with audio or video conferencing to bring teams together to sort through incomplete or out-of-date data, complicated by the blind spots that exist in most IT infrastructures.
The three basic questions will also be familiar:
“Where’s the problem?”
“What changed?”
“How do we manage something this big?”
And, almost inevitably, the answer returns: “I don’t know.”
However, answers can be to hand. As IT infrastructures have evolved, so too have monitoring tools, designed to address both the scale and complexity in today’s networks.
They’re collecting more information, trying to process it faster, visualize and report it more clearly, creating performance baselines for each element.
At their best, monitoring systems are flexible enough to adapt to specific business goals, technical requirements, standards, and protocols.
The new generation of monitoring tools can give much more of the fast, usable information operators need to say “I know.”