How many of you grew up wanting to be in IT, yet alone IT Operations? Did you grab your backpack and run to high school career day hoping to get a glimpse of the mainframe administrator? Are you fond of raised floors, cable ties, and the weird mix of hot and cold air simultaneously blowing at your body? Perhaps, you love trying to explain to your family what you do for a living while constantly carrying multiple mobile devices?
All kidding aside, IT Operations plays a critical role within your respective companies. They are stuck between the needs of the business, the needs of the customers (internal and external), and the timelines of the development organization. It’s a thankless job whereby you are penalized when something goes wrong and are nearly invisible when things are working as planned. The closest analogy I can think of comes from the NFL. IT Operations are the offensive line of the IT industry as the only time they get noticed is when the referee throws a flag.
We expect IT Operations to maintain everything from mainframes to UNIX, Windows to Linux, applications to networking, storage to virtualization, and everything in between. In the past, each of these disciplines were silo’d with their own set of tools that were tied together through a network centric eventing system also know as a manager of managers (MoM).
With the advent of virtualization (mainframe, x86, UNIX and network), the silos of yesterday are being torn down. The static paradigm of the past has given way to the dynamic paradigm of today and a future that is filled with SLAs and automation. It is no longer sustainable to maintain these silos either within knowledge or tools. To put it another way, simply blaming the network is no longer acceptable as virtualization crosses everyone’s domain!
For years, we have heard about the mythical single-pane-of-glass. While the concept was great, its implementation was less than satisfactory. Pulling data from multiple systems with multiple data stores and file formats into a single view is both difficult to implement and maintain. To make matters worse, “new” solutions that claimed to provide a single-pane-of-glass were actually cobbled together products via acquisitions sewn together under a common marketing name. These projects were often expensive to implement and require a never-ending stream of professional services.
What is needed is a new approach for IT Operations that provides monitoring for applications, compute, storage, networking, virtualization and more all tied together through a common model and data store. Furthermore, this new approach must understand the complex relationships between the different disciplines within a dynamically changing environment. Finally, IT Operations must be able to tune the system to automate everything from trouble ticket generation, general notifications, and other automated actions.
At Zenoss, our mission is to Transform your IT Operations to meet the challenges of today’s dynamic infrastructures. Zenoss Service Dynamics is a unique IT Operations platform that crosses silos and domains providing you with a single solution that is unified, extensible, automated, and scalable.
Next week, I will be presenting a 30-minute webinar, End Silo'd Monitoring: Turning Operations from No to Go! I invite you to join us next Wednesday to see how you can put an end to silo'd monitoring and turn No into GO!
Click here to see the recorded webinar, End Silo'd Monitoring: Turning Operations from No to Go!
