Modernize Your Legacy ITOM Tools

To thrive in business today, enterprises are including cloud environments, hyper-cloud environments, and new application architectures in their IT ecosystem. In fact, according to Flexera’s 2019 State of the Cloud Report, 84% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy, and 58% have a hybrid strategy. However, outdated legacy tools were only designed to support legacy infrastructure and cannot support cloud-based infrastructure and its containerized micro-service application architectures. Since these multiple, disjointed tools were added ad hoc as your multi and hybrid clouds developed, they were not designed to play well together, leaving you with a fractured visibility into your infrastructure, including gaps and redundancies. And poor visibility into your operations can prevent you from addressing and resolving IT issues quickly and that can lead to extended downtime. You may think an investment to modernize your legacy tools will be expensive, but every day you put off modernizing your legacy tools, you are losing money.

Use Case 1: Eliminate visibility gaps while driving tool consolidation.

When you are using several tools with siloed visibility, it’s difficult to find and fix your problems fast and efficiently. Each one of these tools may be looking at a different part of your system. Some of them are looking at the same part of your system. And there may be parts of your system that are not monitored at all. Legacy tools were not designed to provide complete end-to-end visibility of cloud and containers, which results in gaps and redundancies coming from multiple sources. The costs to your business of working this way are two-fold: wasted time while your IT professionals chase down the source of problems and the extended downtime that occurs when issues are not resolved quickly.  In fact, according to a Vason Bourne report, The State of IT Innovation, CIOs surveyed who were saddled with legacy tools admitted that 90% of their budget is spent on these “keeping the lights on” tasks. When you replace disparate tools with one platform that can comprehensively and holistically access every part of your ecosystem, you will instead have a single source of truth, maximized visibility, reduced cost, IT/ business alignment, and business agility.

Use Case 2: Avoid business service impact.

Legacy tools also do not allow for an understanding of the interdependencies of applications and infrastructure because these relationships change dynamically. This leaves you vulnerable to business service impacts that can lead to poor customer experience, customer loss, incomplete transactions, and revenue loss. Today’s customers expect a seamless, failure-free experience when dealing with your business. And you want to avoid having your customers walk away from a bad experience and straight to your competition. According to Vason Bourne, the top reasons CIOs were modernizing tools were the competition from their industries, the need to create new services and inspire customer loyalty, the imperative to expand into new markets, predictive assessments of future customer needs—and mostly because their customers expect it. A collection of disjointed legacy tools cannot give you a clear picture of the health of your business services and the business impact during outages. By understanding business service impact, you will be able to reduce the risk of change, confidently adopt new technologies, and accelerate new service deliveries—enabling the business services and UX your customers demand.

Use Case 3: Reduce event/incident noise to lower MTTR.

Too much data can make it hard to find the critical information you need to avoid disruptions, identify performance issues, and ensure operational stability — particularly when much of the data that IT organizations generate is incomplete, fragmented, or, worse yet, inaccurate. The data can quickly overwhelm an IT operation’s ability to process it, turning all that data into noise. Multiple disjointed legacy tools that alert you to anomalies with noise without context can impede your ability to determine root cause and accelerate mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). This can lead to lengthy service disruptions, issues with finding the fault in the system, a poor customer experience, and costs associated with outages. And this cost is significant. Gartner estimates the average cost of downtime at roughly $300,000 per hour. And for high-volume operations, the cost can be much higher. It’s difficult to determine the root cause in the presence of a preponderance of noise, but determining root cause is necessary before remediation can be automated, and MTTR can be accelerated. An accelerated MTTR means improved IT/business alignment and less money lost to downtime.

Use Case 4: Tame cloud resources and spend.

According to a report by EMA, approximately 35% of enterprises are leveraging four or more public cloud providers, 72% of enterprises are struggling with unsanctioned and therefore often ungoverned Kubernetes environments, and over 50% of enterprises are currently struggling to leverage existing IT tools and staff to manage modern container and microservices-based infrastructure. In the course of cloud adoption, you may have over-provisioned for more services than you actually need—resulting in under-utilized, unused, and unnecessary services. You may also have projects that you no longer need. Conversely, you may be near a capacity limit that you are about to exceed, and you won’t know it until it’s too late. The financial impact of unknown resources unnecessarily sapping money and computing assets cannot even be known without a clear picture of your ecosystem. The bottom line is you cannot optimize cloud resources you can’t see. And with multiple, unrelated legacy tools, you won’t see it.

Use Case 5: Onboard new technology and customers with speed and agility.

If you are a service provider, your experiences adopting new tools have been slow, painful, and expensive. Installation and adoption can be a potential upheaval for your business. There are programs to up-load, tests to run, and professionals to train. All of this takes time, and time is money.

The world of ITOps is evolving. Competitive enterprises continuously extend their technology footprint to include cloud, virtual machines, microservices, containers, Kubernetes, and more. Therefore it is important to have visibility into the entire hyper-convergent infrastructure—the cloud, servers, network, storage, applications, and services—helping ITOps see how each component relates to each other.

Transforming Business Challenges Into Wins

Our customer, the service provider NetDesign, faced similar challenges outlined above and set out to transform its service delivery operations function by consolidating its toolset with the ScienceLogic SL1 Platform. Find out how. Why did NetDesign choose us? Because SL1 is designed with accelerated customer onboarding in its DNA. First off, SL1 is a single platform, providing the scalability as your business grows—helping to eliminate additional onboarding processes. This single-source streamlined approach:

• Accelerates time-to-value and profitability
• Reduces risk of acquisition
• Reduces costs through automation and improved operational efficiency