IT Analytics delivers answers that current IT management tools can't provide
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This document discusses how current IT management tools are unable to effectively manage today's complex IT environments due to a lack of insights from large amounts of data. It introduces IT analytics as an emerging solution that can help address longstanding challenges in change and configuration management by extracting meaningful information and detecting problems through analysis of big data from various IT sources. Specifically, IT analytics uses algorithms to provide actionable insights and intelligence that current tools are missing to help IT operations better support complex environments and applications.
IT Analytics delivers answers that current IT management tools can't provide
- 1. IT Analytics Delivers Answers That Current IT Management Tools Can’t Provide Since the early 1990s, enterprises have relied on modern IT management tools to monitor infrastructure and applications in the data center. However, these rigid tools are not equipped to manage the chronic change and configuration challenges presentlyfacing IT. While these tools provide lots of raw data, they lack insight into the actual meaning buried in all that data. It’s time to recognize the chronic change and configuration challenges for what they truly are: “big data” problems. This article focuses on the challenges and gaps that exist in managing IT operationsand how emerging analytics-based tools stand to provide meaningful information, to ultimately close the gaps. Today’s IT Challenges: Complexity, Speed, Silos The IT landscape has grown in complexity supporting a wider and growing range of technologies and platforms (Virtualization, Cloud, Open Source etc.) As Forrester recently declared, “If you can’t manage today’s complexity, you stand no chance of managing tomorrow’s. With each passing day, the problem of complexity gets worse. More complex systems present more elements to manage and more data, so growing complexity exacerbates an already difficult problem.” (Forrester Research Turn Big Data Inward With IT Analytics) Accelerated application deployment schedules are driving high-paced change activity to meet business requirements. For IT Operations, change takes place at every level of the application and infrastructure stack, pushing IT to stay on top of an ever growing collection of information and environment content. Without systems to manage and organize growth, IT will drown in it’s own data. Given the complexity of the applications and infrastructure expected to be supported, IT management approaches have spread responsibility out over multiple departments based on IT function silos, divorced from incident and problem response processes, leaving many unauthorized changes unaddressed. A Big Data Problem?Existing IT ManagementTools Get Lost in the Noise Existing IT management solutionswere not designed to deal with such challenges of the modern data center.IT management toolsgather a lot of information, coming from a variety of sources: logs, application performance availability data, change and configuration data, and transaction data. Yet, buried in piles of distracting data, IT operations cannot find criticalinformationthat could provide valuable insights. Like the “needle in a haystack” problem: you know it’s there but you just can’t find it. The disappointment with IT managementtools stems from the fact thatthey never approached this as a ‘big data’ problem. “The tools present us with the raw data, and lots of it,but sufficient insight into the actual meaning buried in all that data is still remarkably scarce.” (Forrester Research) Chronic 15 year old Change and configuration Management (CCM) problems
- 2. The high pace of change in business can happen only when IT supports it. However, often during updates to the configuration, errors caused from human or automated processes have been implicated in unexpected performance or availability degradation. This leaves gaps, with senior IT execs asking themselves: When an incident occurs, do I instantly know “what changed”? How to identify quickly what the incident’s root-cause? How can I verify the consistency of my environments? How can I validate that releases deployed accurately? IT Analytics is Turning Big Data Inward IT Analytics can provide the insights to help IT more effectively manage operations.Using mathematical algorithms and other innovations, IT Analytics extracts meaningful information from the sea of raw data collected by IT management and monitoring technologies. "IT Analytics lets you manage this complexity by turning big data inward,” (Forrester Research Turn Big Data Inward With IT Analytics)Forrester explains that “IT analytics is an exciting field because it represents breakthrough innovations that can bring substantial value and lasting competitive advantage to the businesses that adopt them and to vendors that create the right solutions.” Emerging Analytics-based Tools Detect Problems and Solve Performance Issues The next generation of IT operations tools needs to be able to aggregate literally tons of dynamic information coming from multiple sources, and to translate this ‘big data’ into actionable insights. As the complexity of the underlying infrastructure grows, operations may be compelled to perform repetitive, time-consuming tasks to close gaps. Analytics tools can automate these effortsand translate insurmountable data into critical decision- support information, providing actionable insights that address practical day-to-day operations questions.They can analyze the application performance data, or index and search machine data based on system execution (logs), or take a transaction-centric approach, feeding data into an analytics module for business-relevant reporting and alerts. Yet, managing the configuration of multiple environments is still the bane of IT Operations. Between applications, environments, and individual instances, mistakes and unauthorized changes still happen, wasting Operations’ time managing configuration values. Analytics-based technologies can provide the intelligence lacking in the current IT Managementtoolset, dramatically improving the ability for IT operations to support today’s complex environments.
- 3. “IT analytics tools hold the promise of helping IT organizations better manage the technology that runs their business. Think of it as turning the concept of big data inward to make better decisions about the business technology services and the underlying infrastructure and applications.” (Forrester - Turn Big Data Inward With IT Analytics)