Why the ITOA Approach Will Push IT Ahead

The pace of change in todays IT landscape is truly astonishing. IT Operations is expected to support wider ranges of technologies and platforms, as well as accelerated release schedules and still solve time-sensitive business challenges, despite cost pressures and growing complexity that frustrate many IT Ops teams. The volume, variety, and velocity characterizing this data, makes this a big data challenge for IT Operations. Traditional approaches in IT are just not equipped to deal with the complexity or dynamics of todays IT landscape. Fortunately as of late, IT Ops can turn to a new approach for taking on this challenge – IT Operations Analytics.

Traditional IT Management Tools Cant Keep Up

Facing and managing huge amounts of data has become even more difficult as the rate and frequency of change grows. While traditional IT management tools have been applied to collect enormous amounts of raw data, unfortunately they lack the analytic capabilities to draw insights from todays piles of big data. As noted in a recent Forrester report, The tools present us with the raw data, and lots of it, but sufficient insight into the actual meaning buried in all that data is still remarkably scarce. (Source Turn Big Data Inward With IT Analytics)

Gartner Research has also recently concluded that IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) technologies are primarily used to discover complex patterns in high volumes of often “noisy” IT system availability and performance data, providing a real inference capability not generally found in traditional tools. (Source: Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2013: IT Operations Analytics by Will Cappelli; Colin Fletcher; Jonah Kowall).

The Emergence of IT Operations Analytics (ITOA)

With the IT landscape changing and its complexity growing, the amount of data that IT Operations is required to keep track of has grown so dramatically it severely impacts the ability of IT Operations to properly maintain performance and availability. Long implementation periods involved in running traditional technologies and the little actionable information yielded has left IT Ops quite vulnerable when performance drops.

Much to the relief of IT Ops teams, emerging ITOA solutions can now deliver better data center performance. ITOA can quickly discover the root causes of IT system performance problems, assess the relative impact when multiple causes are involved, analyze service cost and anticipate performance impacting events among other things under the responsibility of IT Operations Management.

Gartner Research VP Will Cappelli, reported in a webinar, We have taken a position that by 2018, 25% of Global 2000 will have deployed an IT Operations Analytics platform taking data feeds from a variety of performance and availability systems, that’s up from about 2% today.

IT Operations Analytics Is Redefining IT Operations

In the same spirit of business intelligence (BI), ITOA blends complex-event processing, statistical pattern discovery, behavior learning engines, unstructured text file search, topology mapping and analysis, and multidimensional database analysis.

Vendors are repositioning their offerings to leverage IT big data, and offer their customers the ability to apply advanced analytics in the context of IT Operations. The ITOA Landscape, a vendor agnostic industry website, reflects this development with the ITOA50 list, highlighting IT Operations vendors that are providing ITOA solutions that analyze in vast volumes and extract insight buried in piles of complex data, allowing IT Operations teams the ability to more proactively determine risks, impacts, or the potential for outages.

In a recent interview, IDC research advisor, Bill Keyworth, aptly described the revolutionary impact of ITOA saying, You have mountains and mountains I dont event know how to describe the mountains of data that are coming at you and there is no way you are going to get on top it. ITs no longer the kind of network monitoring system like it was 15 to 20 years ago. You are getting huge amounts of data made available to you. So what we want to do is we want to take action thats based upon timely, relevant, complete and accurate information. And eliminate the guess work. Thats what I think IT Operational Analytics brings to an organization.

Improving IT Operations Performance

Most IT Operations teams spend a disproportionate amount of time chasing various root causes for performance issues, primarily because poor technology obscures clues to resolution. IT Operations leaders need new ways to deliver more value to their business. Tools for effective decision-making can improve the Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) teams ability to allocate resources to the right types of activities.

IT Operations Analytics tools stand as powerful solutions for ITs arsenal to help sift through heaps of big data to find patterns. Now is the time to put some of that same business intelligence thinking to work for IT, bringing the analysis of big data inwards for IT Operations.

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