A new mindset and business approach for managing infrastructures is creating a real buzz and excitement in the market today. Throughout the past few weeks, I talked with many different customers about the concept of infrastructure analytics. And wonder: what does infrastructure analytics mean to you?
IT groups are no longer measured by just uptime and availability or the cost side of IT administration. They are now accountable for delivering business results that support the top line of the business. During a recent customer advisory board meeting, I summarized a discussion on infrastructure analytics by saying customers need to understand the meaning of yellow. It is no longer sufficient for infrastructure and application management solutions to just deliver green or red indicators of up/down of availability.
Applications and infrastructures eventually degrade or deliver the less than five-star experience customers require. IT teams need business focused analytics to help pinpoint where the infrastructure is impacting customers and associated revenue. IT teams also need to know when systems performance impacts the customer experience because minor or major warning thresholds turn yellow or orange. They need alerts when system performance affects revenue generating services and must know whether the alarms are handled by redundancy and elasticity that is architected into the system. In short, they need to separate the noise from the really important issues.
I have many questions for you.
* How are you shifting your thinking for your business?
* Have you made the shift to a customer and business centric approach to managing your apps and infrastructure?
* Are your solution vendors having these conversations with you?
* Are you taking a different approach to tools and vendors you work with to help you make this shift?
* Are your application business teams and the technical architects driving the five-star experience as they design the application?
* Are you planning for and building elastic cloud ready monitoring solutions to handle the hybrid environments?
* Are they set up for SD-WAN enabled data centers and do you have the end-to-end visibility to manage both the cost side of the equation and the revenue impact to the business?
As an expert in the area of cloud and network infrastructure management, I certainly encourage you to pause, step back and think about the approach. If you have other approaches, ideas or thoughts please comment and share with this community.
I think this is an exciting time for delivering applications and businesses to end customers with the explosion of new technologies and ideas. When we talk about enabling IT leaders to deliver new expectations we elevate the value of application and infrastructure management solutions. This is what happened with the shift and adoption of cloud and SDN.
The next question which I will bring my next blog is WHAT are some key IT infrastructure business analytics that are most needed? @IT_Management @CA_UIM @IM_Analytics