How to Avoid Service Outages with Total Service Awareness

But when organizations acquire and deploy new technologies, applications, and services, the result is increased complexity for IT, and new challenges for CIOs and IT operations (ITOps) managers tasked with meeting the expectations of the business and its customers. These challenges are exacerbated by the cloud and on-demand, software-defined systems which can be activated—or deactivated—at the speed of light, and often without knowledge or regard for the effect on downstream systems operations.

Technology research and analyst firm 451 Group recently reported that 58% of enterprises have adopted a hybrid approach to building their IT environment, using both on-premises and cloud-based systems to run the business and deliver services. This combination compounds the challenges of maintaining the health of the enterprise. Under traditional approaches to ITOps monitoring and management, there is a tendency toward technology siloes—and a lack of visibility into all the components that make up the enterprise.

Overcoming Conflict with Full Visibility

Today’s organizations benefit from full visibility across the enterprise, and complete awareness of the health and status of every business service and every piece of infrastructure that makes it run. Why? Because we rely on digital services and can’t afford outages, unpredictability, or undependable and inefficient operations. Customers won’t tolerate it, and when the unexpected happens and there are no readily available answers, it causes internal conflict in the IT war room.

The simple fact is that people can no longer keep pace with the speed of operations and change that characterizes today’s enterprise. But that is not an excuse for a failure to delight the customer and contribute to the bottom line. No matter how your enterprise evolves—cloud migration, technology modernization, applications and services adoption, mergers and acquisition, routine technology upgrades and investments—real-time visibility and service awareness is best practices for properly managing your team, responding to incidents, and diagnosing and resolving issues.

With the support of machine learning and advanced analytics—giving you real-time visibility to understand the business impact and prioritize work based on business relevance, you can act in advance to prevent service outages, resolve or avoid incidents, and automate additional IT process workflows. This means you can do what you’ve always aspired to do: scale your operations and services so that your organization is poised for growth and innovation.

Less Finger-Pointing, More Action

Full-stack visibility across all applications, physical and virtual servers, containers, clouds, storage, hardware, and network resources, means you know the health and status of your enterprise, and in a cloud environment you also have awareness across shared resources. That level of contextual visibility allows you to quickly understand the business impact, and zero in on the root cause of incidents, resolve issues, and implement automation based on predictive analytics. Instead of finger-pointing, you can take action.

Without complete service visibility, you can’t effectively prioritize your team’s efforts to tackle the most critical service issues affecting performance and to resolve problems. Without complete service visibility and awareness of the upstream and downstream effects of the deployment of new technologies and applications, you may not know how those changes will impact your environment and, more importantly, the services they support. But with complete service visibility, you can focus on what matters most, because it’s not about just seeing, it’s about doing things such as:

• Automating routine tasks like onboarding new technology, discovering and monitoring new resources, and ticketing;
• Synchronizing your monitored resources with your CMDB in real time;
• Capturing troubleshooting data as issues occur and enriching incidents with that information; and,
• Generating and reporting on business outcomes.

Having these capabilities produces the tangible effect of speeding mean time to repair and better meeting customers’ needs, speeding time-to-value and return-on-investment for new technology and service acquisitions and reducing the risk of service outages and service level agreement violations.

In the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” there’s a scene that takes place as the world teeters on the brink of nuclear war. With incidents unfolding beyond the control of those in command and tensions high, U.S. General Buck Turgidson and USSR Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky get into a shoving match. A frustrated U.S. President Merkin Muffley shouts, “Gentlemen. You can’t fight in here. This is the war room!”

It’s a classic moment in a classic Hollywood comedy, but when tensions are high in your war room, it’s no laughing matter. Total enterprise visibility and service awareness can give you the answers and context you need to maintain control, avoid conflict, and minimize time spent in your IT war room.

If you’d like more information on achieving actionable service awareness that benefits all of your enterprise’s stakeholders, why not check out our upcoming webinar, “Beyond Service Visibility”? Register now»