For any IT service provider the service is the business, and assuring it is the first line of customer and revenue protection. Until now mid-sized service providers have had no choice but to resort to a multiplicity of tools and consoles to manage and monitor their services from the application down to the underlying infrastructure.  

Some illustrative areas covered by these tools include network monitoring, storage monitoring, log monitoring, system monitoring, virtualization monitoring, application monitoring, database monitoring, VoIP monitoring and others. Despite claims to the contrary by so called suite vendors, no single monitoring system provider can cover all aspects of management, across all technologies and across all layers, at any given time. There is simply too much out there to address and this market is too dynamic for any one vendor to address it all.

While higher order event consolidation frameworks exist, they are highly expensive, take months and years to configure and need armies of staff to maintain. Most mid-size service providers have bypassed using these framework platforms altogether. 

Consequently, mid-size service providers have ended up with a combination of monitoring tools whether they like it or not. These tools produce their own specific IT events and alarms in their own environments, leading to multiple consoles that command centers operators have to inevitably negotiate through inefficient ‘swivel chair’ management.

Furthermore, because of scalability constraints -most of the existing mid market tools apply only a rudimentary logic of IT event elimination and consolidation, and offer even more limited coverage of real-time events.

In some cases, they may simply discard events rather than process them so that these are neither seen, nor controlled by operators – leading to missed alarms that are eventually business impacting. Operators learn about such events when customers call in with a problem.

In other cases, they may easily overwhelm operations teams with non-correlated alarm floods that often lack business context – lengthening the time to prioritization, escalation and ultimately remediation.

In summary, most current monitoring systems in use in mid-size service providers sacrifice accuracy, granularity, and enrichment to operate within a limited scale. While this worked for low velocity of change environments, this is an unacceptable proposition as we enter a new era of computing with increasing demand for intelligence, elasticity and compliance.

In my next post I will discuss a new approach to Real Time IT operations that meets the needs of the mid size Service providers in this time of change.