The Time Has Come for IT Operations Analytics — Part 2

In the previous installment in this series, I made the case for utilizing IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) technologies. In this post, the focus will be on the practical application of these technologies in the real world.

The Benefits

According to IDC, the principal benefits of IT Operations Analytics include the following:

• Avoidance of service interruptions, slowdowns and outages
• Faster root cause analysis and problem recovery times
• Enhanced system and application performance
• Improved end-user experience
• Increased operational efficiency
• Improved compute resource utilization

The benefits outlined by IDC translate to an improved bottom line through increased revenue and decreased operational costs. And a better bottom line is good for your entire organization, not just the IT team.

Modern digital transformation efforts position IT operations as a catalyst for innovation and business optimization, a decidedly inverted perception of the cost center designation that IT operations have traditionally endured. To maintain this shifting and positive reputation, IT organizations must now, more than ever, eliminate outages, downtime and failures.

Today’s evolving ITOA platforms are becoming a crucial part of supporting IT operations to adapt and thrive at the speed of business.

Get Proactive

Organizations today are completely changing the way they provide IT services to their increasingly complex applications. As the automation and orchestration of these services become more common, so too must the identification and remediation of problems that arise within them.

ITOA platforms now have to predict potential problems before they happen and automate fixes before users and business operations are affected.

Advancements in machine learning in recent years have allowed for the addition of predictive analytics, anomaly detection and business impact analysis to become integrated features of ITOA platforms. Whereas the focus previously had been solely on troubleshooting and problem investigation, today’s technologies focus on proactively ensuring IT service availability.

Monitor the Monitors

The marketplace for IT monitoring and management tools is becoming increasingly more crowded. Traditional Network Performance Monitoring (NPM), Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and vendor-specific tools are presenting organizations with challenges in correlating data across these platforms.

To truly understand what is happening across both systems and applications, organizations require a real-time view of everything involved. ITOA platforms remove the manual process of correlating information from disparate monitoring tools into a singular global view. This convergence of information allows for better real-time monitoring and simplifies the troubleshooting and remediation process.

The loathed conference calls during outages where constituents from separate domains log in to their monitoring and management tools to report their status, (i.e. innocence), can become a thing of the past with a proper ITOA platform in place.

Democratize Analytics

Delivering analytics to the masses helps groups understand the consequences of their actions. With an ITOA platform, users can see in real time the negative effects they unknowingly produced. Changes in application configurations can affect the network, cloud services, storage requirements, etc. Seeing these effects in real time allows for more collaboration across IT organizations and better course correction along the way.

The insights delivered from ITOA technologies are not solely important to the IT shop. The ability to correlate IT operations metrics with business metrics can allow for users across an organization to gain greater insights and make better decisions about their business overall.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll look at commercially available solutions that can put your organization on the path to enjoying the benefits of IT Operations Analytics.

Learn more about partnering with CDW to drive the most value from your operations data.