Event Storms happen when your IT team’s ability to generate data far surpasses your team’s capacity to make sense out of it all. It’s too much data. It’s coming at you too fast. And it’s coming in different formats, from far too many devices and their interfaces, protocols and point tools.
Do you think that everyone who evaluates your team’s Mean Time to Repair actually understands the order of magnitude of the data you’re facing? I’m betting they don’t. [In their defense, large numbers are hard to get their head around. If this helps at all, their getting a hundred emails in a day compares to your getting 20,000 events in that day kind of like them contemplating a giant redwood tree versus your contemplating West Virginia.]
Picture this scenario (don’t try this at home… or in the office)
1) You sit down a couple of your more demanding business stakeholders at quarter’s end, and tell them you’ve just inserted 20,000 emails (or a combination of emails, voicemails, text, skype, & Twitter messages, etc.) into their accounts.
2) You tell them that somewhere within this deluge is a message indicating a pending HUGE quarterly revenue miss, that could possibly be partially recovered if they acted fast enough.
3) You get out your stopwatch & stand over their shoulders as they begin the exercise.
4) Don’t forget to increase the pressure periodically, maybe with increasingly-frequent phone calls, or offers of help from other areas.
Are you curious how long it would take them to identify the message with materially-relevant business information? Me, too.
I certainly wouldn’t want to pace back and forth behind these unfortunate business leaders, as they apply various filters in each account, or perform the same keyword searches in various places. Maybe they go grab some peers for help. Maybe they pull in staff for a quick run-down of the status of each and every one of the biggest customers. Maybe they call ex-colleagues looking for suggestions or rumors. Maybe they pull out their hair after wasting precious hours on false leads. All while the last hours of the quarter wind down while they’re stuck on a fishing expedition.
You and I know that a problem of this order of magnitude just isn’t humane treatment for your coworkers. And yet too many of you have trouble communicating this situation, and the economic impact of similar situations faced by IT teams everywhere.
So we’re bringing in Forrester Research for a series of discussions and a market survey on the topic of quantifying just how overwhelming this situation has gotten. We’ll measure the noise as a way to showing how much we need tools that can amplify the signal OVER the noise. Because the economic value of finding the signal–and fast– is of material relevance to your business.
We hope you’ll join us for the first in this series.
On-Demand Webcast: Eliminating Event Storms - A Webinar with Forrester Research
Date: Friday, June 7th
Time: 1pm CDT, 2pm EST, 11am PST
Presented by: Jennifer Darrouzet (Zenoss) and JP Garbani (Forrester)
We’ll cover how we got here, what’s working and what’s NOT in current conditions, and kick off an IT Operations survey to help quantify the operational noise level, and its impact. So you can get a ready-made business case for taming Event Storms once and for all. We hope you’ll join us, and participate in the survey. Because savvy business leaders who get it will be able to make informed decisions from it, and lives will get easier across the IT team–and beyond.
Image Credit: Image from the cover of the printed edition of "The economist" Feb. 25th 2010
