Making the Business Case for Unified IT Monitoring Solutions

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER Making the Business Case for Unified IT Monitoring Solutions Guidelines for evaluating the cost and impact of enterprise IT operations platforms

2 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION... 1 DIRECT COSTS OF A MONITORING SOLUTION... 1 Acquisition Costs... 1 Ongoing Costs... 2 Cost Savings...3 IT OPERATIONS PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY SAVINGS...4 Faster Resolution of Service-impacting Incidents...4 Improved Efficiency through Better Business Incidents...5 PREVENTING BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY AND REVENUE LOSS... 6 CONCLUSION... 7 After you ve finished with this... Watch a 3-minute demo on Unified Monitoring with Zenoss - See how Zenoss delivers centralized, real-time event management and complete visibility for your entire dynamic and static datacenter environments, with an extraordinarily broad list of support for operating systems, applications, hardware, environmental controls, virtualization, and cloud computing. View the Demo now» OR Request a free evaluation - Try out all of the features of Zenoss Service Dynamics inside your own infrastructure along with full support from our world-class support team. Try Zenoss now»

3 Introduction In large IT organizations, monitoring tool sprawl has become so commonplace that it is not unusual for administrators to be monitoring 10 to 50 solutions across various departments1. While this paper does not address the cause and effect of this phenomenon, it provides an accounting of how unified monitoring solutions like Zenoss offer a cost-effective alternative for those seeking to rein-in monitoring inefficiencies. By establishing a central nerve center to collect data from multiple tools and managed resources, IT groups can gain visibility into the end-to-end availability and performance of their infrastructure. This helps simplify operational processes and reduce the risk of service disruption for the enterprise. This paper can help you make an effective business case for moving to a unified monitoring solution. Key considerations include: The direct costs associated with moving to a unified monitoring tool The savings potential of improved IT operations through productivity and efficiency The business impact of monitoring tools in preventing and reducing both downtime and service degradation Direct Costs of a Monitoring Solution When it comes to purchasing a unified monitoring solution, you ll need to look at the overall cost model associated with your monitoring tools and compare the before and after picture. Unified monitoring tools are unique in enabling tool consolidation that can reverse tool sprawl making it possible to reduce your overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by eliminating redundant monitoring toolsets. Acquisition Costs For any IT monitoring solution that you are evaluating, the cost to acquire and implement the software and services are important for your business case, but be aware that these costs are often just a small component of the total impact to the business. Calculating these costs is relatively straightforward the solution software/service cost itself, the infrastructure needed to run it, the time and effort it takes to 1 How too many tools can impact your IT operation efficiency, Forrester, January See the above paper for more information 1

4 deploy it, and any costs for integrating it with existing or new systems. To truly capture the value of unified monitoring, there are specific considerations to be taken into account. Software and Hardware What do the initial licensing, maintenance, and support costs look like over a 3-5 year timeframe? What infrastructure is needed to support the solution? How many servers are required? Can they be virtual or must they be physical? How many databases do you need? Are database licenses included? If not, must they be purchased separately or will you face internal charges for license usage? What storage or networking resources are required? Does the architecture of the solution introduce any additional infrastructure costs? For example, agent-based solutions require CPU and memory allocations on each server they are deployed on. Deployment How many hours of professional services are required to deploy the solution and what is the going rate? Do you need to pay for on-site support during implementation? Do you require a dedicated project manager? Do you need in-house resources to support deployment? How many hours will these dedicated resources be pulled away from primary responsibilities? What is the cost of training your administrators? How many people will be trained? How many days/hours of courses are required to become proficient? Integration Will your unified monitoring solution also serve as a Manager of Managers (MoM)? How many tools are needed to capture traps, events, or logs? How many components make up the solution itself? Are they built on a common code base or do you need to integrate them with each other? Do you need to integrate with an existing ticketing system or CMDB? Ongoing Costs After deployment, you will need to factor ongoing costs into your business case, including: 1) Recurring hardware and software costs 2) Ongoing vendor licensing, maintenance, support, and services costs 3) Internal administrative costs for keeping the solution up and running You ll also need to account for the effort it takes to upgrade the solution to take advantage of new features. Complexity will be a key influencer in each of these costs. More solution components means you ll have to pay more maintenance and support fees, work more administrator hours to manage the solution, and spend even more hours upgrading. Because unified IT monitoring solutions, such as Zenoss Service Dynamics, are built on a single code base, they tend to lower the impact of these ongoing costs. There is less infrastructure (servers/databases) required to run the centralized platform, fewer administrators needed to manage it, and upgrades are simpler since there are fewer moving parts. 2

5 Software and Hardware What are the subscription or annual maintenance and support fees for the monitoring solution? What are the maintenance and support fees for the supporting infrastructure (databases, servers, storage, networking equipment)? What are the environmental costs for the solution and all of its underlying infrastructure? Power and cooling costs? Datacenter rack space and/or floor space rental fees (cost per square foot)? Internal Administration How many FTEs are required to manage the solution? Do you have to pay for additional professional services for ongoing customization, configuration/scripting, or integration work? Upgrades Are there licensing costs associated with new versions? How often are upgrades released? Are professional services required to implement the upgrade? If not, how many FTE resources/hours are required to implement the upgrade? Does the solution have agents that need to be upgraded/patched on a regular basis? Cost Savings In As mentioned above, unified monitoring solutions have the unique potential to eliminate multiple tools from your environment as they can consolidate functionality in a single platform. These significant savings can be realized upfront as the solution is deployed, or phased in over time depending on your needs. Many organizations have successfully funded the acquisition costs of a unified monitoring solution simply by decommissioning existing tools and eliminating their associated costs. Your level of savings will depend upon your specific environment. Software and Hardware How many tools are currently being used for performance and availability monitoring? Which of these could be eliminated by deploying a unified solution? What are the licensing/maintenance costs that will be eliminated? What infrastructure can be eliminated by consolidating monitoring into fewer tools? Can you remove databases and server licenses? 3

6 Internal Administration How many FTEs are required to manage the solution? Do you have to pay for additional professional services for ongoing customization, configuration/scripting, or integration work? How many hours of upgrade time will you save? Integration What integration costs are you saving by eliminating existing monitoring tools? Can the information provided by the solution make existing ticketing or CMDB systems more effective? HOW ZENOSS CAN HELP Zenoss is a unified, agentless solution that can be deployed quickly and easily extended to collect performance and availability information from any physical, virtual, or cloud-based device. By centralizing monitoring on the Zenoss solution, organizations can decommission some of their local, single purpose monitoring tools that have up built up over time. Organizations that were using agent-based solutions can save memory and CPU resources on all monitoring servers with Zenoss agentless approach. We were able to eliminate the maintenance costs from 12 individual monitoring tools that we decommissioned after deploying Zenoss We also reclaimed about 1GB of memory and 4-5% compute capacity on each server by moving to an agentless solution. - A Midwestern Regional Bank IT Operations Productivity and Efficiency Savings Once you ve reviewed the direct costs of the unified monitoring solution, you will next need to look at the expected IT operations savings in terms of productivity and efficiency. These solutions are designed to make these savings readily achievable evidenced by your improved ability to identify and resolve performance and availability issues but also in the time it takes to realize these savings. Unified platforms are typically quicker to deploy and configure than highly componentized legacy monitoring solutions, meaning that time to value is accelerated. Faster Resolution of Service-impacting Incidents There are two key areas where IT organizations can capitalize on productivity and efficiency savings. The first is by impacting Mean Time to Resolution. Unified IT monitoring solutions by definition provide a unified view of the environment, defining the relationships between devices and business services. With this new visibility, finding the root cause of an issue becomes much easier, 4

7 This unified view has the correlating benefit of administrator empowerment. Because each administrator has access to a complete understanding of what is occurring in any given server, that single administrator can easily drive an issue to resolution. This introduces additional savings by keeping the remainder of your staff focused on primary responsibilities, instead of constantly firefighting. A recent Forrester study indicated that 45% of enterprises spend anywhere from one hour to five days identifying root cause for a single business critical incident and 63% required four to 10 FTEs to address a major disruption. So the savings introduced by unified monitoring can be significant. dramatically improving overall resolution times. HOW ZENOSS CAN HELP Zenoss provides quick time-to-value with flexibility to conform to existing IT operations processes and unified visibility across groups that eliminates unproductive finger pointing. Understanding the relationship between managed resources and the services they are supporting allows you to automatically prioritize which issues are most critical and provide the information necessary to quickly drive to the root cause of an issue, dramatically reducing MTTR. It only took us about six weeks to get everything up and running where we were truly benefitting from it. We could never have done that with another solution Mercy Medical Center Improved Efficiency through Better Business Intelligence Unified monitoring s ability to provide a more complete picture of your infrastructure is another key area in your business case. Faster, better decision making is now possible as information is pulled across the environment so every administrator has a consistent, realistic view of your IT operations at any given moment. Data is collected over time and can be analyzed and reported on to give administrators the best information possible to make decisions, including insights on capacity planning. Insufficient capacity is a top issue for availability and performance problems3. Being able to identify trends in demand will allow organizations to keep services functioning at peak levels without adding costs of overprovision excess capacity just in case. How much quicker can you identify the root cause of an issue? Can you prioritize response to serviceimpacting events? Can you quickly determine which components are actually the source of an issue? How does this impact your overall MTTR and SLAs? How many weeks does it take for the solution to start delivering on benefits of lower MTTR and improved issue resolution? How many hours will you save eliminating war room meetings just trying to determine which group is on the hook for identifying and resolving the issue? Does the solution allow you to reduce reporting and capacity planning time through improved infrastructure visibility? How much overprovisioning can you eliminate? 3 ZENOSS-COMMISSIONED FORRESTER STUDY, AUGUST

8 HOW ZENOSS CAN HELP Zenoss also provides unified analytics that help organizations provide streamlined reporting and make smarter decisions for capacity planning. With Zenoss we have a year of statistics. We use this information to improve decisions, eliminating a lot of fingerpointing For example, one agency needed better performance from their image processing application. With Zenoss, we were able to graphically show the customer that slow disk drives (IO waits) in the storage system was the issue, instead of reflexively purchasing faster CPUs. The State of North Dakota Preventing Business Productivity and Revenue Loss The final element of your business case will need to focus on the business impact of unified monitoring. This is defined by how well the solution prevents downtime, which results in organizational productivity and revenue loss. MTTR comes into play again here, as the quicker you can resolve a service disruption, the less impact there will be to the overall organization. If your website, order processing, or billing systems go down, every minute counts not only to your bottom line, but to your business reputation. Therefore, unified monitoring, with its centralized view of the enterprise, can end up being a decisive factor in limiting your business risk. In terms of calculating the business impact of downtime, we ll look at employee productivity and revenue loss (see our full Cost of Downtime article for a more thorough look at this topic). According to an enterprise IT operations survey conducted by Forrester in September 2012, nearly half of respondents indicated that the business impact of downtime was $100,000 or more per hour, with 15% of enterprises saying that hourly cost came in at more than $1M. To determine your downtime costs, you can use the below equations: 6

9 Example: If Company ABC generates $500 million annual revenue from its website, the business impact if their website performance degradation allows only 40% of transactions would be as follows: Total number of hours/year = 24*365 Average revenue/hour = $500,000,000/(24*365) = $57,078/hour % transactions lost because of degradation = (1-40%) = 60% Hourly impact = $57,078 * 60% = $34,247/hour Another important element to consider is whether a monitoring solution can easily adapt to the latest technologies you need to support your services. If you are moving from physical to virtual or from virtual to cloud-based services, how quickly can the solution flex to accommodate all of the resources you need to monitor for availability and performance? This is another important time-to-value consideration: If a new service is ready to be launched, but it will take three to four months to get your monitoring solution in place, that is three to four months of revenue and productivity that will be impacted. HOW ZENOSS CAN HELP Zenoss provides a single view into availability and performance across physical, virtual, and cloud-based resources and the services they support, helping identify issues before they lead to downtime or degradation. When performance or availability issues do occur, organizations can immediately understand the service impact, allowing them to get services back online more quickly. After the first full year of having Zenoss deployed, Nature.com increased website availability, exceeding SLAs and improving customer experience and overall customer satisfaction Nature.com has reduced outages and performance issues that would have otherwise impacted contract renewals and new customer referrals. Nature.com Conclusion Making the business case for unified IT monitoring requires that you look at the direct costs of the solution, as well as the business impact in terms of efficiency and organizational productivity. In weighing costs and savings, unified monitoring offers unique differences when compared to traditional, highly componentized legacy monitoring solutions. Direct costs can be mitigated by the solution s ability to consolidate monitoring functions and to reduce the total number of tools in your environment. These solutions also present distinct advantages when it comes to deployment and operation. Self-contained and operating on a single code base, they allow IT to get the solution deployed, configured, and delivering value faster. In many cases, the ability to streamline IT operations is the most advantageous part of the business case for unified monitoring. By providing an end-to-end view of the infrastructure, administrators can more quickly highlight risks and pinpoint the source of any given issue. Time spent finger-pointing and firefighting is also reduced as individual administrators are empowered to single-handedly identify and resolve availability and performance concerns. As a result, downtime and performance degradation can be reduced, maximizing employee productivity and minimizing revenue losses. 7

10 Next Steps: Watch a 3-minute demo on Unified Monitoring with Zenoss - See how Zenoss delivers centralized, real-time event management and complete visibility for your entire dynamic and static datacenter environments, with an extraordinarily broad list of support for operating systems, applications, hardware, environmental controls, virtualization, and cloud computing. View the Demo now» OR Request a evaluation - Try out all of the features of Zenoss Service Dynamics inside your own infrastructure along with full support from our world-class support team. Try Zenoss now» Four Points Drive Building 1, Suite 300 Austin, TX 78726, USA Phone: Toll-free: Zenoss and the Zenoss logo are trademarks, or service marks of Zenoss, Inc. All other trademarks listed in this document are the property of their respective owners.