Monitoring 101: Gaining Visibility into Your Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Savvy organizations are embarking on a journey toward Autonomic IT to better manage their IT environments, particularly as hybrid configurations grow in popularity and are accompanied by greater complexity. Driven by AI and automation, Autonomic IT can help organizations optimize resource allocation, improve the effectiveness of maintenance efforts, avoid downtime, and keep end users happy. However, without effective full-stack visibility, organizations can’t move forward on their journey to the autonomous business model.
These organizations can overcome their observability challenges by establishing effective infrastructure monitoring that encompasses all aspects of hybrid infrastructure—including servers, routers, storage arrays, and anything software-defined—to actively diagnose and prevent resource saturation. With comprehensive visibility, organizations can not only prevent an outage that affects customers, but also lay the groundwork for Autonomic IT.
- Map relationships between infrastructure and applications
Most applications do not run on dedicated infrastructure. Instead, they are set atop components spread throughout the entire IT ecosystem, complicating the ability to effectively monitor these applications. Monitoring solutions that just offer visibility into infrastructure, without displaying how applications are distributed on top of them, are insufficient. It’s imperative to see across the entire IT ecosystem and understand how various components are related. This is sometimes referred to as understanding the full topology of IT. Thus, the first step to comprehensive visibility, is app-to-infrastructure mapping.
By mapping the topology of both apps and infrastructure, organizations can more easily identify gaps and overlaps in visibility across the data center, cloud, hybrid cloud, and containers. From identifying regions with increased operational costs to using dependency mapping to identify bottlenecks in performance, having a single source of truth is the foundation for comprehensive stack visibility.
- Compose business services
In a world of containerized workloads, tracking individual IT devices and apps is impractical and ever in flux. Instead, organizations must identify the most critical services—ones that offer value to both internal and external customers—to prioritize work and more closely align IT assets with broader business goals. With a full view of IT topology, organizations can easily identify and pay close attention to these services. Common examples of business services include verification of internet access or website hosting, remote backups and remote storage, payroll, online trading, and online banking. Usually, a business service includes a Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Having a service-centric view of IT infrastructure goes beyond visibility to offer a data-driven look at the impact of IT on the business. If a financial institution wants to achieve a certain level of trades in a day, for instance, monitoring specific servers or applications isn’t useful. Instead, these organizations can turn to a service-centric view to identify and isolate the root cause of any problems more effectively.
- Add analytics and automation
With a clear sense of applications, infrastructures, and how they work together to serve customers, organizations have the foundation required to implement analytics and automation. More specifically, machine learning can help organizations understand what aspects of key business services can and should be automated. With automation, organizations can keep up with the pace of change, detect concerning anomalies, easily capture diagnostic data, improve mean time to repair (MTTR), and free IT management teams up for higher-level work.
Altogether, the rapid pace of change in both technology and customer needs requires a shift from device-centric to service-centric management, so intelligent automation can be achieved. By embracing automation, organizations can achieve a new level of agility and responsiveness that directly improves customer experiences and business outcomes.
The bottom line
AI and automation can revolutionize an organization’s IT efforts by enabling them to uncover valuable trends, have a comprehensive view of system performance—including areas of IT infrastructure that are underutilized—and automate entire workflows. But that can only happen if organizations ensure they have full stack visibility first. This begins with app-to-infrastructure mapping, is furthered by a service-centric view of the stack and culminates with automation—including the cost and time savings it allows.
The bottom line is that traditional IT approaches can undermine an organization’s ability to assess the true impact of performance issues on customers and the business. Only with sufficient monitoring can organizations work towards Autonomic IT, excel in highly competitive markets, and stay ahead of both business sand customer expectations.
