Four Strategic Ways to Use IT Monitoring Tactics When Budgets are Tight. A White Paper

Transcription

1 Four Strategic Ways to Use IT Monitoring Tactics When Budgets are Tight A White Paper

2 Introduction Flying blind and without instrumentation it s out of the question for an aircraft pilot who has to navigate through turbulent skies. Yet you force yourself to do the equivalent when your IT monitoring does not provide the visibility and control to guide your cost-cutting measures. The tighter the budget gets, the more your organization needs to have the right IT monitoring tactics in place to make sure expense reduction is effective and does not cause service levels to plummet. Ensure Cost-Cutting Actually Helps There s nothing to gain from the pain when your business isn t helped by the cost-cutting a downturn brings. Cutbacks in the wrong places can send important applications into a tailspin and damage the business. Without adequate monitoring information, you will not be able to identify all the servers and applications that can be consolidated, redeployed, or decommissioned and the impact that would have on compliance with service level agreements (SLAs). Four Strategic Ways to Use IT Monitoring Tactics When Budgets are Tight Ensure cost-cutting actually helps Preserve or improve ability to meet SLAs Keep infrastructure lean Show that IT is accountable and transparent An economic crisis forces change and you do not want to miss out on this opportunity to improve the design of your business. For example, IT monitoring can provide a means to automate repetitive duties. Automating tasks such as scouring event logs will free up time and improve the staff-to-server ratio. Simple operations such as restarting services can also be automated, then alerts can be escalated in those cases where human attention is necessary. Detailed alerts put actionable information in the hands of IT professionals. Supplied with this knowledge, less experienced personnel are able to handle a wider scope of issues without escalating problem-solving to senior staff. When these alerts are automated and prioritized intelligently, it lets you reduce staff coverage during off hours without posing a threat to application service levels. Monitoring Events by Application in Longitude

3 Preserve or Improve Ability to Meet SLAs Monitoring software that possesses service level knowledge can map problems instantly to the business services affected, which allows an already stretched IT staff to prioritize. Your team is able to focus on what is most important to the business. Cross-silo monitoring, sometimes known as event correlation, enables monitoring across multiple tiers including the application, database, and Web server. Rather than presenting events in isolation, cross-silo monitoring shows interdependencies and how combinations of conditions affect service levels. The root cause of problems can be pinpointed faster so that time-to-resolution is quicker. You decrease your company s exposure to what can be the very hefty costs of failing to meet SLAs, including loss of sales and customer loyalty. Visibility across multi-tiered applications gives IT management better insight for capacity management. Managing technology assets so that you have neither too little nor too much capacity becomes indispensable in a down economy. What s more, IT organizations that have cut back during previous business cycles may already have systems and applications running at high levels of utilization. Where your company (further) consolidates resources, systems will run even nearer to capacity and require closer monitoring. Keep Infrastructure Lean After the IT infrastructure has been optimized for efficiency, your organization will be looking to make sure operations stay as streamlined as possible. Software that includes capable performance reporting will help you differentiate between peak loading issues and chronic overloading of servers. Often, system upgrades can be avoided simply by offloading certain operations to other times of day. Monitoring and reporting software can also differentiate between capacity issues and problems with applications. Even if funds do exist in your budget, why buy more hardware when the software can be optimized?

4 Providing increased insight into user habits, such as usage, is another way that monitoring and reporting software helps to save money. You will be prepared to educate users about their resource usage and implement quotas or restrictions if needed. By instituting best practices monitoring that includes built-in application performance and network monitoring solutions, you will also equip IT staff with tools that let them do a better job when they are called upon to cover areas where they have less expertise.

5 Agentless Monitoring Makes It Achievable The volatile economy can provide an incentive to see how well agentless monitoring and reporting software can help your organization deliver on SLAs, while lightening the load on your budget and staff. Compared with agent-based software, agentless monitoring is a newer, less-resource-intensive approach to getting the meaningful data you need. Agentless software does its work without the need to install software agents on the systems being monitored. As a result, agentless software is able to contribute to improved IT service delivery without sapping precious server resources. Because agents are not necessary on the monitored systems, agentless software also takes less time to install and deploy. That s time your staff can spend on other things. This type of software is also known for costing less than traditional monitoring software, so it is less of an investment than you may imagine. Last but not least: Vendors understand the pressures their customers are facing and may be more flexible in their packaging or licensing terms. Don t assume you cannot afford to take on something like performance monitoring. Good vendors the ones you stay with will maintain fair pricing, and show a willingness to work with you to arrive at a solution to fit within a shrinking budget. Conclusion Your business needs as much visibility and control as possible to weather a stormy period and come out strong on the other side perhaps even stronger than before. Although investing in any new initiative seems counter-intuitive during an economic downturn, there are good reasons why changing your performance monitoring and reporting software can improve the effectiveness of expense reduction and help keep your company out of harm s way.

6