Recently, I attended the Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations conference in Las Vegas. I enjoy these events because I’m able to hear directly from industry analysts and IT professionals about current trends, pervasive challenges and emerging opportunities. This year’s overarching theme was digital business transformation and what Gartner refers to as Bimodal IT.
Bimodal IT describes the people, processes and technology required to simultaneously deliver and manage mode 1 apps (characterized by infrequent changes and rigid governance) and mode 2 apps (characterized by agile DevOps practices designed for continuous delivery and experimentation).
Bimodal accurately depicts both the challenge and opportunity for digital business transformation. But missing from the dialog is the enormous collision I foresee as mode 2 becomes more prevalent: how will IT Ops monitor and manage these vastly different applications at the same time? Mode 2 apps are no less important than mode 1 and, in fact, many mode 2 apps depend on mode 1 apps for logic and data.
From a monitoring perspective, mode 1 apps are mostly aligned to managing infrastructure availability and performance (north-south) whereas mode 2 is aligned to managing application performance (east-west) as measured by end user experience and transactions. Bimodal IT success will require both forms of monitoring so an open question is whether IT organizations will adopt a best-of-breed tools strategy or look for a solution that unifies infrastructure and application performance monitoring.
What are your thoughts on Bimodal IT and the future of monitoring?
