Three Reasons Why You Might Have Cloud Monitoring Problems: Part 3: A Solid Case for Hard and Soft Cost Savings (Show Me the Money!)

If you aren’t taking a hard look at consolidating and minimizing your use of monitoring tools, it’s time to do so. The practical reason is that the choice is being made for you by “The Big Four.” In response to the changing monitoring landscape, BMC^®, CA, HP, and IBM are letting their popular products reach end-of-life so they can focus on other business opportunities. If you currently rely on them, you’re going to need to find replacements. Soon.

But chances are you’re probably already looking at other monitoring and management options amid the shift to a cloud-centric paradigm. Gartner predicts that 90% of enterprises will operate on a hybrid cloud model by 2020, and that means a need to integrate legacy investments with new cloud-based services for storage, applications, infrastructure and on-demand compute power. Each with its own toolkit. Convenient—until you try and get them to work together.

Now, if you are not part of Gartner’s 90% embracing the cloud’s myriad cost and business agility benefits, then you might be part of the 85% the firm says are putting a collective $225 billion in cloud-related investments at risk. That risk is because, while launching on a journey to the cloud, those enterprises are not also adopting what Gartner calls a “holistic approach to monitoring.” In other words, they’re using a hodgepodge of tools to keep track of what’s going on even though it’s possible to do it with a unified platform—a single pane of glass.

Since your organization is already convinced that it’s time to go cloud, there won’t be a better time to change the way you also monitor and manage your assets that will inevitably reside there. Doing so will be easier for the staff tasked with keeping the lights on, but it will also pay off in reduced hard costs, not to mention numerous soft cost benefits.

Find out how ScienceLogic can help you tame cloud sprawl.

You’re skeptical. I get it. Vendors are heavy on hype and empty promises; you’re channeling your best Rod Tidwell and shouting, “Show me the money!”

Not long ago we were engaged by global systems integrator General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) to help them with, among other things, wrangling their sprawling array of network management tools. GDIT found themselves with 23 different tools from various vendors to tackle management tasks, including ITSM, financial applications, security, cloud and big data, and more. Instead of making it easier to deliver services, things were getting harder. Worse, the lack of a unified data model meant that GDIT couldn’t trust the data that was shared between applications.

Cutting to the chase (you can read the full case study here), our cloud monitoring tools consolidated GDIT’s toolkit from 23 down to one. A single pane of glass management view of their entire infrastructure. The immediate hard cost-benefit was a savings of $3 million. That ain’t chump change.

What’s more, once the hard dollar savings were tallied, the soft cost benefits of GDIT’s tools consolidation started to become evident. They added more applications—applications they were reluctant to adopt because of compounding complexity—to their arsenal to provide opportunities for productivity to their various business units; they were able to allocate IT personnel to higher-level operations thanks to the reduction of hours spent on menial tasks, and they were able to provide a higher overall level of service to both internal and external customers as a result of improved processes and better insights gained through more accurate data and more precise analytics.

Every situation is different. Your results may vary. But if you find that your management toolkit is suffering from a combination of sprawl and end-of-life decisions by your vendor, and if you think you might benefit from a more efficient use of your budget and human resources, it’s not hard to see how these results might translate to your own situation. Let your imagination run wild. If we can help with more inspiration, let us know.