Today’s enterprise IT environments have become complex & dynamic, with a combination of physical and virtual infrastructures using legacy and modern technologies. It is changing rapidly with the automation of infrastructure setup, workload distribution and application deployments and transition to agile processes. Although modern IT approaches have replaced manual processes with automated scaling and elastic resources, they depend on various activities being executed through an automated platform.
To deliver high-performance and stable IT operations, staffs end up taking shortcuts, bypassing automated and manual processes. Eventually, it leads to applicaton defects and infrastructure failures. Nevertheless, IT departments need to be able to control their environments, diagnose and pre-empt problems and incidents. Unfortunately, most of existing IT tools don’t collect adequate data and don’t do a robust job of handling the data they collect. Activity dashboards are cluttered, and have too many alerts that users end up ignoring them.
Making Big Data Analytics Actionable for IT
An organization’s IT environment typically generates Terabytes of data about system metrics, change logs, event logs and other operational data. It is possible to obtain extremely granular data about the history and current state of your IT environment. The key is to make this data actionable. However, the challenge is to do it rapidly, with minimum overhead. As IT is required to drive more output with fewer resources, IT specialists don’t have months to invest it training, rollout and deployment of a typical enterprise solution. The same specialists need to deal with day-to-day IT issues. This leaves them with even lesser time to proactively manage operations.
Data Analytics for IT Operations
The rise of IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) makes IT’s big data usable by blending and correlating this data, automatically coming up with actionable insights to manage & improve operations. This process means collecting as much data as possible, to avoid missing any critical information, and narrowing it down to useful conclusions. The business side of organizations have already adopted this approach, running operations in real-time. Ironically, although IT is supplying the business users with the necessary big data analytics they need, IT itself is lagging in this respect.
In the past, the business side of organization faced a similar challenge due to the growing pile of structured and unstructured data. Currently, business users deal with Big data using technologies for managing and analyzing large, diverse sets of data. These Business Analytics tools are capable of processing large amounts of data in various formats from anywhere, and correlate data to provide business managers & executives with new insights to help run their business. They can be used to design & develop systems for ITOA.
ITOA can provide meaningful insights based on domain understanding of operational data. This will provide IT operations teams visibility into the behavior of business sytems, enable them to automatically identify and isolate critical events, such as system changes, that have the potential to disrupt existing sytems. ITOA enables you to quickly identify potential issues upfront and understand these issues from the mountain of raw data collected by various monitoring systems. This empowers IT operations to efficiently determine the best way to restore systems, meet performance and availability expectations.
Change-driven Data Analytics
IT must adopt a change-driven approach to deal with operational issues swiftly. Changes are a major source of IT issues. Every time there are changes in application, data or infrastructure, business systems are exposed to risks. By focusing on changes and their impact, IT specialists can analyze data about performance, availability, security; identify actual causes and potential issues.
With the help ITOA, IT operations teams can constantly monitor how changes are affecting various systems, what risks they introduce, use data to gain actionable intelligence and respond quickly.
