Most everyone has some source of information on the health of their environments. Your experts know where to go and what to do when you get those cryptic messages and log files. To those content with the deep knowledge and where events and log files supply you with everything you need, I applaud you – you belong to a rare breed. Combing through logs or events takes time and effort, and rarely does it yield the speediest “return-to-service” solution.
For me, like most people, a picture is worth a thousand words. Trite, but true. Let me throw another one at you: IT is getting increasingly complex. This is also true–with containers and Kubernetes, microservices, SaaS, and whatever critical new technology was just announced.
Now, I know pictures can get complex as well, but usually, status is conveyed through some visual cue or property. A red light, a yellow event icon, a big green bar–for me that’s a quick take and I understand it. But what I’m talking about is more than the colors of icons. I find benefit in visualizing devices and how they are connected. Across networks and out to the cloud (and back sometimes)—seeing what’s working together and how data flows can be an important part of troubleshooting and quickly returning assets to functional service levels.
A picture of a device on its own, even with network connections isn’t the pinnacle of visualization, but it’s certainly moving in the right direction. A better solution understands what devices work together to create business services. This breaks down the barrier between IT and what the business offers: an e-commerce solution, a SaaS-based service, a customer management offering, or even your VoIP network.
One area that is still difficult to ascertain is the concept of the ephemeral – VMs or containers that come and go (or suspend when not needed), queues of messages that fill and empty over time, transitional connections and more. Some products do provide ways of displaying devices, events, even representations of these devices even after they disappear so the end users get a much more accurate picture of what’s alive and how they are doing.
If you have a complex environment and want to see a visual representation of all your assets and how they connect or want to expose the interconnectedness of your IT assets, you can’t do better than a service map. If you want to learn more about how ScienceLogic can help you see your entire estate and help you visualize your world–reach out to us and we can help.
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