While the majority of hype within today’s IT industry is around cloud computing, the reality is that most enterprises are struggling to deal with the everyday monitoring and management of legacy infrastructure, classic server virtualization, thousands of applications, demands on the network, a hodgepodge of storage technologies and pressures of reducing costs while improving efficiencies. Worse yet, individual IT silos are so desperate to solve critical issues that they maintain maintenance agreements with legacy Big-4 monitoring vendors, which are not suited for either today’s dynamic infrastructure or changing role, while adding expensive niche tools to the mix. This phenomenon is what I refer to as The Tale of an IT Grocery Store. It goes something like this:
Zenoss Deep Dive: - Unified Monitoring [Link to Recording]
Imagine walking into an IT grocery store seeking to restock your enterprise. Each silo obtains a shopping cart or basket depending on their needs. Your CIO plots an optimized route through the store and provides some guidelines for each silo head. The shared services/platform group charges ahead of the pack and begins to purchase the staple of their IT monitoring and management infrastructure. Meanwhile networking and storage look for the latest goodies while seeking out product demonstrations and taste tests. Next, Virtualization, Development, and Cloud disappear moving in seemingly different directions. Lastly, the ITIL, COBIT, or whatever framework you are using silo watches in disbelief as they have no basket at all. Finally, all the carts and baskets converge at the checkout counter where purchasing awaits and decides what stays and what goes as they are determined to maintain their fiscal budget. On the way out, each group is dissatisfied and doesn’t realize that they purchased overlapping products and ignored what was already in the cupboard only to do it all again next week.
IT isn’t supposed to be battle between silos; it’s an enabler for business goals and objectives. Our ability to work together to monitor yesterday’s legacy infrastructure, today’s converged infrastructure, and tomorrows Hybrid IT is critical to the success of the business and our careers. The ultimate objective must be to move IT from reactive to proactive and to provide the necessary agility and reliability that your enterprise’s demand. There must be a better way.
Unified monitoring is not about fulfilling the broken promises of a single-pane-of-glass. It is about monitoring compute, network, storage, application, virtualization, legacy infrastructure, and more within a single solution. This solution provides IT with the ability to speak a common language, to combine data locked within an individual silos into a complete picture, to enable operations to move from note takers to problem solvers and to meet the business goals of your business by cutting costs while increasing capabilities.
Finally, a unified monitoring solution provides the intelligence to make a software defined data center / programmable data center / programmable infrastructure a reality. It must be open and extensible to conform to your needs while providing unequivocal value throughout the organization. This includes both internal and external customers including technical and non-technical stakeholders. While this approach is not new, the legacy Big-4 vendors have not risen to the challenge while commercial open source offers the clear path to success.
Don’t get stuck in the IT Grocery Store as there is a better way.
You're invited to watch the Zenoss Deep Dive on Unified Monitoring [Recorded 11/14/12]. We will discuss event management and how to get a handle on all your devices including servers, network, applications, storage, virtualization, converged infrastructure, cloud and other event managers in your environment from a single tool.
The ultimate goal is to prevent issues from impacting end users but when something goes wrong, you need to be able to find the root cause of the issues fast. We will show you how Zenoss helps keep your entire system up and running and minimizes the dreaded finger pointing blame game.
Link to Webinar Recording
Image Credit: Filxya
