Connecting the endpoints

With an increasing number of endpoints being added on an almost daily basis, and more and more varied business processes coming to rely upon them, enterprise IT infrastructures are becoming larger and more complex. This growth in size and complexity, along with the huge volumes of data that pass through the infrastructure each day, is presenting IT operations teams with ever greater challenges that they are finding harder to address.

A recently commissioned study by Forrester Consulting revealed the extent to which IT departments are struggling to cope with the demands made of them by this increased complexity. It highlighted the level of frustration felt by the majority of organisations at the lack of insight provided by IT monitoring solutions in helping to quickly resolve service issues.

According to the study, over a third of companies still experience daily issues in performance and availability that directly impact their business, and two fifths said that it can often take anywhere between an hour and a full day to identify the root cause of such issues. As a result of this, the study suggested, the cumulative downtime during which services could be out of action can run into millions of hours.

These issues, along with the growing sense of dissatisfaction felt by end-users towards their IT departments, signal an urgent need for operations teams to shift their focus from a reactive, maintenance-driven approach, to something more pro-active and innovative, tailored to the needs of the end-user.

And all of these challenges, both from the demands on the IT infrastructure and those of the end-users, are being presented at a time when budgets are becoming tighter, meaning that CIOs are having to find more efficient and cost-effective ways of working.

With these concerns playing on the minds of CIOs, and without the necessary financial or human resources to address them, consideration should be given to the use of real-time analytics as a potential solution. By analysing vast quantities of operational data in real time, IT operations teams will be able to identify the trends and anomalies that they can use to monitor the vital signs of their organisation’s IT infrastructure.

Analysis and insight
Recently identified by Gartner as an emerging sector, IT Operations Analytics, or ITOA, is a form of real-time analytics that is expected to have a major impact on the IT industry as it enters the mainstream over the next five years.

The advanced analytics used by ITOA tools will directly capture vast volumes of diverse data generated by the various endpoint and processes entwined within an organisation’s IT infrastructure, aggregating and analysing it to provide CIOs and senior IT operations managers with a thorough, and increasingly important, source of operational and business data.

This data will provide IT operations teams with full visibility into the performance across their organisation’s IT infrastructure, automatically identifying and isolating inefficiencies, disruptions and failures as they occur – and often before the end-user is even aware of them. In addition to this immediate awareness of potential issues, ITOA tools can also deliver a rapid understanding of their impact – both in technical terms and from the point of view of the wider business.

Once the issues have been identified and isolated, additional intelligence can be delivered to IT service desks, offering them easy access to the knowledge that users require in order to help restore or maintain the level of service they expect.

Ultimately, the insights granted by IT operations analytics will allow even those CIOs with limited budgets and resources to make quicker, more informed decisions, and deliver a more consistent and efficient service despite the increasing size and complexity of their IT infrastructure.

And, unlike traditional network and performance management solutions, ITOA tools are able to scale to monitor whatever number of endpoints applications are running in a given production environment, without requiring extensive per-application configuration.

Clarity and visibility
IT operations teams are likely to welcome the insight that ITOA provides into their IT infrastructure and its various endpoints and applications, as there is currently a lack of clear visibility into the consumption of an organisation’s IT services, and how these services are perceived by its end-users.

Despite many organisations claiming that they actively monitor their networks and servers, it’s still the case that more than half of the IT issues reported by end-users are not being picked up by back end monitoring tools.

According to the previously mentioned Forrester report, the current lack of insight into service delivery issues has meant that businesses are often manually interpreting data in order to identify the source of the problems.

The report also suggests a lack of trust in the veracity of the service issue alerts themselves, often meaning that the resolution process won’t begin until the IT service desk is notified of the issue by the end-user affected.

By employing ITOA tools that offer an end-user perspective, however, the IT service desk will be furnished with a graphical view of the current state of the IT infrastructure along with all and any devices connected to it. In addition, ITOA will enable them to look back to any given point in time, and review the activity history of a given device, allowing them to spot any historical changes that have been made, such as previously installed applications.

In doing so, it will be possible to identify and isolate a particular issue on a particular affected device, before identifying any other devices on the infrastructure that have a similar configuration. This precise focus will then allow pre-emptive measures to be put in place before similar issues affect other users elsewhere in the organisation.

Change and progress
In addition to providing IT service desks with a clear and current view of an organisation’s IT infrastructure, IT operations analytics can also be used in the planning of migration and transformation projects.

90 per cent of such projects, according to analysts, suffer delays in their implementation, meaning that they fail to deliver the benefits expected of them.
Potentially costly downtime can be minimised by ensuring that any planned changes are kept under control, and any unplanned changes are pro-actively detected and flagged.

By employing ITOA tools, particularly those that offer an end-user perspective, those responsible for the planning and implementation of such initiatives can have a clear picture of exactly what devices and applications are currently being used. Armed with the information necessary to help avoid making costly mistakes and assumptions, they will be able to easily identify and resolve potential issues before they threaten to derail a project.

The potential cost savings made here alone may be enough to justify any expense incurred in the implementation of ITOA.

The use of IT operations analytics will see IT operations transformed from being a reactive function to a being a pro-active service that, by identifying and addressing issues across the IT infrastructure, will have a direct impact on business outcomes. By enabling IT service desks to quickly identify and isolate problems as they occur on an individual end-user’s device, IT operations analytics can help to anticipate more widespread issues before they take place in the wider IT infrastructure.

CIOs challenged with facing larger and ever more complex IT infrastructures on restricted budgets, as well as users who find themselves increasingly frustrated with performance and delivery issues, will demand the insight and improved resolution time that ITOA brings.

And as the developing Internet of Things brings significantly more connections and interdependency between endpoints, ITOA will go from being an optional extra to an essential part of a business’s IT infrastructure.

For CIOs, service desks, and users alike, it would appear that this latest development in real-time analytics could not have arrived at a better time.