Over the past ten years, enterprise IT has been transformed by the expansion and maturation of the cloud.
The cloud has made it possible for enterprises to cost-effectively and quickly develop and deploy a large number and wide variety of digital services. Meanwhile, the growing ubiquity of high-bandwidth wireless networks and connected devices has made it possible for customers to access these enterprises’ digital services anytime, from anywhere in the world.
As innovative companies like Amazon, Salesforce and Slack use the cloud to roll-out new digital services that delighted their customers, CIOs quickly found that if they wanted their own enterprise to stay competitive with these and other companies in an increasingly digital economy, they needed to offer such digital services themselves. They also discovered that their legacy IT environments would not support the rapid development and reliable deployment of such services, and that these environments needed to be updated with new cloud services as well as new application, networking, and other technologies. As a result, today’s IT environments include a hybrid mix of multiple cloud services and on-premises infrastructure, dozens of widely dispersed applications, and a variety of wired and wireless networks.
As the digital economy has expanded, IT environments have not just grown more dispersed and complex. Enterprises’ reliance on them to run their businesses has also increased. When these IT environments can’t support the introduction of new digital services, the company’s growth stalls. When these IT environments go down, company’s business operations grind to a halt.
This has made it increasingly important for CIOs and other members of the IT team to understand what is going on internally in these environments. Are all their applications updated? Are they utilizing all the cloud services they are paying for? Are their networks experiencing any bandwidth issues? Are their websites loading quickly? Are they running out of space to store their data?
If they do not have answers to these questions, or otherwise do not fully understand what is going on internally in their IT environment, they may fail to see problems that can lead to outages, brownouts, and other IT performance issues. They may spend more time resolving these problems, as well as any outages and performance issues that do occur. They may not know if they have the IT infrastructure, application, networking or other resources they need to support additional digital service users or deploy new digital services. They may find it more difficult to prepare their IT environments to support the rapid development and roll-out of new digital services.
Until recently, IT teams have used several different tools to monitor their IT environments, each focused on a separate function, segment, or data set. But these tools are increasingly a poor fit for these environments, because they create silos and gaps that prevent CIOs and other members of the IT team from gaining a comprehensive, end-to-end view of their IT environment. They also offer little guidance to the CIO, ITOps, DevOps, and other members of the IT team (who are already strapped for time and resources) on what they should prioritize. In addition, these legacy tools increase the probability that, if some members of the IT team change one of the IT environment’s functions, segments, or data sets, it will lead to problems elsewhere in their environment.
Moreover, IT teams find managing all these monitoring tools time-consuming, inefficient, and frustrating. And because they don’t allow the IT team to see everything clearly — all at once and all the time — they make it more difficult for enterprises to proactively prevent or quickly respond to outages and other performance problems before these problems can negatively impact their business.
If they hope to address these challenges, and cost-effectively maximize their IT environment’s availability, scalability and agility, what CIOs and their IT teams need is a unified way to view, monitor, and otherwise observe their entire IT environment’s performance and capabilities.
Such unified observability: 1) improves IT teams’ ability to discover IT problems that can lead to outages and other performance issues, and more quickly resolve these issues when they occur 2) enables these teams to de-silo data and collaborate more effectively, increasing their productivity 3) enhances these teams’ effectiveness and improves their decision making, increasing the speed and reliability of new digital service releases.
About the Author
Nitin Navare is the Chief Technology Officer of LogicMonitor, where he is responsible for engineering and cloud operations. With more than 20 years of experience in building enterprise software in the monitoring domain, Nitin has led several globally distributed engineering, operations, UX, and data science teams during his career. He is passionate about leading highly talented teams to drive innovation initiatives across product lines.
Featured image: ©Tomertu
