IT Monitoring For the Mid-Market Business: Key Solution Requirements

Transcription

1 IT Monitoring For the Mid-Market Business: Key Solution Requirements

2 Executive Summary For a small and medium size organization, the service levels the IT infrastructure delivers can have a huge impact on the business. However, for many IT teams in these organizations, tracking and managing service levels is a persistent challenge. Too often, administrators only find out about issues after the fact, so the business experiences poor service levels and costly downtime. This ebook offers an in-depth look at why these challenges persist and it outlines the key requirements IT teams need to address these challenges. 02

3 Introduction In their battles to ensure high service levels are being delivered, IT teams in many s are overmatched. That s because they re waging this battle with an inadequate set of tools. Often, they re trying to make largescale platforms that are designed for enterprises work for their businesses, or they re working within the constraints of limited, low-cost point solutions. Either way, they re spending too much time and money on monitoring, but they still lack the insights they need to manage service levels effectively. Without effective monitoring capabilities in place, mid-market organizations are susceptible to erratic service levels and costly downtime, which will continue to hamper business results. In the following sections, we look at the service level management alternatives available to s, and the challenges they pose for these organizations. Then, we outline the specific capabilities IT teams need to start more effectively managing service levels. 03

4 The Monitoring Alternatives, and Their Challenges Many of the monitoring alternatives available on the market were designed for the needs of larger enterprises. Like a larger enterprise, the performance and availability of IT services and infrastructure in small and medium businesses is critical. If an issue arises, whether with an application, a database server, networking equipment or virtually any other element within the data center, it will just about always have significant implications for customers or users and thus ultimately have an impact on the bottom line. Unlike a larger enterprise, however, small and medium-sized businesses have scant resources available to monitor and manage their infrastructure. These organizations can t afford the lofty price tags of large-scale, enterprise platforms nor the huge administrative and deployment teams, professional services contracts and lengthy deployments they entail. When IT teams rule out these large-scale platforms, what s left? IT teams looking for monitoring solutions have often been left with the following traditional alternatives: Open Source Platforms In recent years, the growth of open source has been dramatic. The flexibility and value of open source can provide real dividends for a range of uses. However, when it comes to the business critical nature of monitoring, and its central, integrated role within the rest of the IT environment, open source monitoring can present some significant challenges. While leveraging free or inexpensive open source alternatives can provide some clear up-front savings, what IT teams realize is that they grow too costly and time consuming to maintain over time. Compared to other platforms, these open source alternatives can be difficult to integrate, and, often require the development of a number of scripts that have to be supported by internal staff, which creates a high cost of ownership. Further, if a new system or technology needs to be monitored, it will require internal staff time to make the necessary updates to the platform to enable this new capability. Further, as the number of events and systems monitored grows, these platforms often hit a scalability wall, and the complexity of ongoing maintenance only goes up over time. Often, because these platforms aren t commercially supported, and internal staff doesn t have the time required to support them, they grow obsolete and fail to meet even the most basic business requirements. 04

5 The Monitoring Alternatives, and Their Challenges (Continued) Low Cost Offerings Several offerings have been advertised to provide the small business with an inexpensive monitoring alternative. While the low barrier to entry these offerings provide can be enticing, managers need to look closely at what they re getting for the money. Often, the price is really for a limited, entry-level offering. However, to be viable solutions in the long term, the business needs to make continued investments. Further, what is billed as an upgrade may in reality be a new product. Thus, with each new expenditure, the IT team will also invest its time and focus on scrapping the prior version and rolling out a new one. Another challenge that arises with this class of offerings is the proliferation of modules. Rather than a unified platform, capabilities are delivered through disparate modules, with each requiring its own procurement, deployment and integration. Further, many organizations ultimately need to migrate from these platforms in order to get the insights they need. For example, many of these platforms can t be used to monitor both physical and virtual servers. Consequently, IT teams need to leverage a unique tool and console to track the virtualized environment and another one to monitor the physical layer. This piecemeal approach ultimately makes it difficult for administrators to do troubleshooting, and it means that multiple platforms have to be supported. Point Solutions In many organizations, monitoring platforms have sprung up in an isolated fashion. A DBA may implement a platform to track database server performance, a network administrator may deploy a platform to track the availability of switches and routers and so on. In many cases, these point solutions will be acceptable for these narrow purposes. What s the problem? Warning flags arise when IT leadership begins to look at the time and money associated with the deployment and maintenance of many disparate solutions. Further, these issues only get more pronounced as the organization and infrastructure grow. Finally, this amalgam of products isn t correlated or integrated. This makes it difficult to truly understand and control the user experience, and doesn t facilitate fast or efficient troubleshooting. For example, if an employee calls in to say s down, the IT team will have to go into scramble mode, and many different individuals will have to get involved. The DBA will have to check his monitoring platform, the network administrator will have to check hers and so on. 05

6 Monitoring Requirements for the Mid-Market Organization The need for viable monitoring platforms only gets more pronounced over time, yet the alternatives outlined above clearly aren t cutting it for today s s. To effectively and efficiently begin to control service levels in their organizations, IT teams need several key capabilities. In the following sections, we outline these requirements. Requirement #1: Easy Deployment and Maintenance In small and medium businesses, organizations need robust monitoring capabilities that don t require a lot of time and effort to deploy and maintain. To achieve these objectives, look for monitoring solutions that offer these characteristics: Fast, On-demand Deployment. Look for monitoring alternatives that can realistically be deployed in hours or days, compared with the lengthy, multi-month deployment times of the enterprise monitoring solutions. Extensive Automation. Proactively managing IT environments requires several steps, including collecting data, filtering and analyzing information and acting on it. The more these various steps can be automated, the more effective, and more cost effective, monitoring will be. For example, by setting up automated polling, administrators don t have to manually gather and sift through performance metrics. With automated alarms, administrators can be notified immediately when certain conditions arise. Further, this automation is key to enabling administrators to more quickly spot and address issues before they have an impact on the business. Configuration Flexibility. This deployment flexibility will allow you to get response time visibility from practically any perspective you want. Search for monitoring solutions that have the sophistication and flexibility to be configured for different monitoring scenarios, including one-to-many monitoring configurations in which one remote probe is used to monitor many services, and many-to-one configurations in which many remote probes are used to test one service. In addition, look for solutions that offer both agentless and agent-based data collection, depending on requirements and accessibility of systems monitored. Having this flexibility is key to ensuring the entire infrastructure can be effectively and efficiently monitored. Quick Customization. Look for intuitive, yet powerful performance monitoring that can easily adapt to the unique, and fast changing, demands of your business. In addition, any long term solution should also offer open APIs, a flexible architecture and broad third-party integration, ensuring that you can easily adapt to other management tools and monitoring processes over time. 06

7 Monitoring Requirements for the Mid-Market Organization (Continued) Requirement #2: Support for Heterogeneous Environments The broader the infrastructure coverage a monitoring solution provides, the more benefits you stand to gain from the solution. To be effective and practical, you need a monitoring platform that is equipped to address all the systems that power the services your business relies on. Depending on your environment, this may include monitoring coverage of the following systems and services: Virtualization platforms, such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Solaris Zones, IBM PowerVM, Citrix XenServer and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization VDI environments like Citrix XenDesktop Public and private cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Google Apps, Salesforce.com, CloudStack, Vblock and FlexPod Networks, including routers, switches, firewalls and VoIP Servers, such as Windows, Linux, UNIX, Cisco UCS, Novell Open Enterprise Server and IBM Power Systems Databases, such as Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Informix and IBM DB2 Applications like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft IIS, Active Directory, Citrix, WebSphere, JBoss, homegrown applications and much more End user experience, including the measurement of end-to-end transaction times With the right multi-platform monitoring tool in place, platform-specific variances can be masked from administrators, presenting a consistent monitoring interface for the entire infrastructure. Ultimately, this broad infrastructure support makes it possible to much more effectively and proactively manage the infrastructure and better ensure optimal service levels for users. Further, it is only through this heterogeneous support that administrators can begin to enjoy monitoring views that offer a cohesive, correlated view across the environment which is vital to fast, efficient troubleshooting. While ultimately comprised of an array of systems and infrastructures, in the end what really matters is the performance of the business service, whether that s e-commerce, , or any other function. Consequently, the monitoring data being generated across disparate sources needs to be intelligently analyzed and correlated in order to deliver service level insights. 07

8 Monitoring Requirements for the Mid-Market Organization (Continued) The Need for a Unified View: Sample Scenario In many IT environments, administrators have historically tracked and analyzed performance by looking at specific systems. However, when viewing these disparate systems in isolation, it can be difficult to fully understand what ultimately matters: the end-to-end performance of the environment and the experience the user is actually having at any given time. The following real-world scenario illustrates the shortcomings of a system-specific approach: An administrator began noticing an error hitting a server s operating system. Working with the storage administrator, he looked to see whether there was an issue with inputs being sent to storage. The administrator looked at the main storage and all indicators showed there weren t any issues. Several more errors occurred, so the lead administrator asked the storage administrator to check the system again. Again, the administrator checked main storage and everything looked fine. Ultimately, the errors persisted, and ended up having an impact on the rest of the ecosystem, bubbling up from the OS, to the databases, to Java and ultimately creating issues for users. Over the course of several hours, database administrators, storage administrators, and application administrators were called in, but they were checking their own views of disparate systems, and everything seemed to check out fine. Ultimately, a storage administrator thought to check the disaster recovery servers, and discovered that was where the issue was originating. A storage controller error was the culprit. This scenario illustrates the huge penalty associated with not having a unified, correlated view of the entire environment. Ultimately, end users suffered due to a sustained outage because the issue wasn t discovered in a timely manner. Further, team members from across the IT organization also took a huge productivity hit, spending hours fruitlessly searching for the cause of an issue. 08

9 Monitoring Requirements for the Mid-Market Organization (Continued) Requirement #3: Complete Package Lean IT organizations can t realistically be burdened with managing multiple rip-and-replace upgrades of their monitoring platforms. These efforts take staff away from their critical responsibilities, and create disruption of vital monitoring services. Consequently, it s vital for IT organizations to invest in a single platform that addresses current requirements, and that can easily be adapted to support the organization as those requirements change. For example, if an organization wants to implement a new virtualization technology, the monitoring platform should be equipped to support the monitoring of that technology without having to add new products or modules, or in any way disrupt the existing monitoring capabilities in place. Toward that end, organizations need a single, unified platform, rather than a set of loosely integrated modules or components. Requirement #4: Unified Service Management To streamline service management and improve service levels, s need to leverage integrated monitoring and service desk capabilities. This integration can provide two key benefits: First, it can improve operational efficiency by streamlining service management. Second, it can significantly speed issue response and resolution. When service management and monitoring platforms are fully integrated, they can share a common configuration management database (CMDB). With this integration, your business can leverage these component s combined capabilities. For example, the monitoring platform can automatically discover systems and status information, and feed that into the CMDB. As a result, your organization can ensure that your service desk agents can always leverage current configuration information when troubleshooting while they minimize the time and effort required to manually update the CMDB. In addition, performance and availability information collected from target systems can automatically generate service desk incidents, allowing personnel to start to triage issues before the user community even notices there s a problem. Requirement #5: Efficient Scalability Any time an initial launch of a new monitoring platform is a success, that will just about always lead to more demands for the new platform. If it delivers value, more administrators will want to use the platform. Managers will want to start monitoring more systems and services. Consequently, an ability to scale to support the monitoring of more systems and collect more event data is a vital success criteria for any long-term monitoring solution. To support these demands, platforms need to provide the following characteristics: High Scalability. The architecture must scale both within and across environments. A Single, Integrated Set of Components. Approaches that require different components and products and integration among them, simply can t be scaled cost effectively. High Availability. The architecture must be resistant to both component and communication failures. Rapid Deployment. The architecture must be fast and easy to deploy into all relevant environments. 09

10 IT teams in today s small and medium businesses have some big challenges. They need to ensure optimal service levels are delivered to customers and employees, but they have very little resources to apply to that effort. By leveraging the right monitoring platform, IT teams can boost their odds of success in this endeavor. To succeed, these organizations need a single monitoring platform that offers easy deployment, complete infrastructure coverage, unified service management and efficient scalability. 10

11 CA Unified delivers the essential capabilities you need to proactively monitor and manage alarms, performance and SLAs across even the most dynamic and complex deployments. Instead of having to deploy multiple point solutions, you can leverage CA Unified and get a single platform to manage your IT infrastructure and services whether they re on premise or in the cloud. CA Unified enables you to get up and running and start realizing business value in minutes. CA Unified features flexible pricing and deployment models that can easily be aligned with your usage of monitoring and the services you provide, which makes it ideally suited to the demands of your. This product can be deployed on premise or via a hosted/saas service from one of our hundreds of service provider partners. With CA Unified, your business can: Realize fast time to value and optimal operational efficiency, with streamlined deployment, ease of use, unified administration and more. Leverage a single platform with an extensible architecture that can help you monitor every device and service that matters to your business. Harness intuitive, sophisticated visualization and reporting that helps boost service levels through accelerated problem resolution and proactive issue prevention. Realize Fast Time to Value and Optimize Operational Efficiency CA Unified helps your IT group reduce the time and cost associated with monitoring, while business and IT management can gain the insights needed to optimize resources, planning and investments. With its broad coverage, CA Unified eliminates the need to purchase, install, maintain, deploy, update and train for multiple tools. Further, CA Unified offers a single portal that makes the solution simple to administer. CA Unified offers these key capabilities: A SaaS deployment model that eliminates the need to procure or deploy a monitoring platform and associated infrastructure. An automated deployment engine that can discover and list available devices and, with a simple selection, let you install monitoring agents to all servers desired. Powerful templates that enable administrators to manage monitoring profiles for multiple systems and platforms, which can significantly streamline ongoing administration. Plus, in virtualized environments, CA Unified can automatically discover, monitor, correlate and display relationships between VMs and VM hosts. When failures or alerts occur, the solution allows quick, simple root cause analysis. CA Unified helps your IT group reduce the time and cost associated with monitoring, while business and IT management can gain the insights needed to optimize resources, planning and investments 11

12 Unified Coverage and Extensible Architecture CA Unified is an efficient, scalable platform that you can use to monitor and manage the following systems and services: Networks, including routers, switches, firewalls and VoIP Servers, such as Windows, Linux, UNIX, Cisco UCS, Novell Open Enterprise Server and IBM Power Systems Databases, such as Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Informix and IBM DB2 Applications like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft IIS, Active Directory, Citrix, WebSphere, JBoss, home-grown applications and much more Virtualization platforms, such as VMware and vcloud Monitor, Microsoft Hyper-V, Solaris Zones, IBM PowerVM, Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Public and private cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Vblock and FlexPod End user experience, including the measurement of end-to-end transactions, as well as real browser monitoring of Web services from over 60 locations around the world 12

13 Intuitive, Sophisticated Visualization and Reporting CA Unified offers a number of capabilities that help you get the most insight and value from the monitoring data captured: Built-in and easily customizable executive views help you spot trends, optimize resource utilization and more. Integrated trending and root cause analysis capabilities help you identify and correct problems before they become outages. Gateways and APIs that enable monitoring data to be leveraged most fully, enabling quick integration with service desks, CMDBs, provisioning tools and much more. Extensive, dedicated alarm and event management. Sophisticated SLA reporting that helps improve SLA compliance. 13

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