Johannesburg, 27 Feb 2020
Monitoring is often seen as part of technology's furniture. Digital systems have been churning out performance data to generate reports that IT teams use almost since their inception. But monitoring today falls far short of what it should, and can, provide to IT, operations and the rest of the business.
Do IT teams really use monitoring? This is not a simple question to answer. The intuitive response would be that they do, but recent surveys interrogating this idea are coming up with very different results. Over half of respondents for a 2015 EMA report said false positives were a severe drain on their resources, while about 30% said that removing false positives would improve their monitoring.
Yet even environments where monitoring works report little value. When monitoring becomes a chore that overrides its value, it devolves into a box-ticking exercise. The reason this happens can be traced back to how the monitoring was first introduced, says Ken Dolbey, Research and Technical Lead at monitoring service provider Sourcing SA: "Customers have failed to see value coming out of monitoring technologies, often because of how it has been implemented."
Monitoring beyond IT
Monitoring is like any form of analytics: results depend on combining data with a desired outcome or question. Connected digital business environments allow monitoring data to play a broader role beyond reporting on systems.
"Running a monitoring system correctly is where the right outputs are prioritised with the right set of actions," says Dolbey. "So if it's business-critical, that in our world is defined as a P1. There's a different set of actions to communicate to the customer, as opposed to performance degradation, when a site may still be available. Maybe the site is running on a secondary line, which can affect the business performance of the site. Points-of-sale may be slower, or data is no longer flowing properly."
Put differently, does a store manager care that the hard drives are filling up? No. But would they be interested to know their tills are slower because of a line failure? Yes. Perhaps not the technical details about the line, but certainly about the cause-and-effect on their operations.
Since modern companies operate on a digital layer, monitoring data offers direct correlations throughout the company. At the most elementary level, proper monitoring helps provide seamless up-time. In an anecdote shared by Dolbey, a customer's SQL database went down. Fortunately, proactive monitoring caught it, and the database was back online in 15 minutes; the rest of the business didn't even notice. That depth and responsiveness can be developed for the rest of the organisation.
Fixing monitoring
Yet most businesses cannot even get monitoring to work to meet basic IT needs. False reports are only a symptom; often the problems stem from poor implementation or a fractured landscape of competing monitoring services.
Dolbey agrees, adding that going it alone with monitoring often leads to problems: "Organisations shouldn't be trying to implement those technologies themselves or rely on the information coming out of monitoring systems that service providers are beholden to. In the first case, it takes away resources and focus from their core business. In the latter case, they don't get the wider benefits of monitoring."
How does one fix this? Take a leaf from the earlier analytics example: you have the data, but what are the questions you want to answer? This is the nub of the argument for monitoring-as-a-service (MaaS).
A MaaS provider's profit doesn't come from selling and installing a monitoring solution, but by creating long-term value. They must know how to read monitoring, get the base working, then move up the stack to look at more business-centric performance such as Web site and credential responsiveness.
"The MaaS provider must do all that work for the customer, who views the dashboards and consumes the monthly reports that are fit-for-purpose for that stakeholder. For some, it will be to cut down the monitoring noise. For others, it could be to plan for online sales surges. Start with the basics, but work your way up to business processes and workflows."
It should be added that monitoring does not deliver business data. It concerns itself with information from the technology estate. Yet that information can put the spotlight on many business questions and complement the output of business intelligence services.
Most organisations miss this entirely. They are still focused on monitoring as a grudge activity, contending with fractured reporting and far too little signal among all the noise. They try to do it themselves or expect different technology providers to offer monitoring as a value-add. The result is a cacophony.
Place the monitoring baton into the hands of a MaaS provider, though, and you can reach a new level of business and technology insight.
Share