Zenoss serves the IT infrastructure monitoring (ITIM) market. Gartner analysts Pankaj Prasad and Will Cappelli recently published their “Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools” (G00308941). My team and I particularly look forward to this annual report because it helps us benchmark our primary research and compare our customer, prospect and competitive findings (inputs to our product strategy) to those of the Gartner analysts who cover our market.
I encourage you to read the full report (must be a Gartner client to access) which explores the ITIM market definition, direction, analysis and recommendations for I&O (infrastructure and operations) leaders. But, having read the report, I want to share my three key takeaways:
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Matters (Now More Than Ever)
There’s no shortage of material describing the exploding complexity and rate of change within today’s IT environments due, in many cases, to investments supporting digital transformation initiatives. It’s not hype, and I know this because our customers tell me it’s not. Furthermore, the wave is only getting bigger as applications leveraging containers and microservices are already imposing new demands on data collection, processing and analytics at IoT scale.
“In the past five years, the ITIM market has moved toward holistic monitoring and away from domain-specific monitoring (server, database, network, etc.). I&O leaders are benefiting from a refreshed ability to reduce the number of tools needed to monitor multiple operation areas. In many cases, I&O leaders are able to improve collaboration across teams by adopting ITIM tools that work across domains.” (Gartner)
A modern, scalable and extensible platform that unifies infrastructure monitoring across domains and service delivery models is what we are. Our customers know it’s not only about consolidating tools and becoming more operationally efficient but, equally important, the ability for I&O leaders to future-proof their monitoring to deal with whatever comes next.
IT Operations Management is a Best-of-Breed Ecosystem
Software vendors, especially those offering an enterprise platform, understand that integration with other commercial software and custom applications is a given. But, within IT operations management (ITOM), which is comprised of multiple segments (such as ITSM, AIOps, APM, Automation), whose software is also evolving to address today’s modern IT needs, it’s not just about “playing nicely” with others. Rather, it’s about automating strategic ITOM processes.
“Prioritize ITIM tools by favorably weighing those offering higher integration and interoperability with broader IT operations management (ITOM) tools.” (Gartner)
Our customers tell us it’s “and” (not “or”) as it pertains to assessing service health, standardizing processes and automating workflows across the ITOM ecosystem. Whether correlating events from other monitoring tools to bidirectional integration with ServiceNow Incident Management or anything in between, Zenoss is committed to an open, flexible, best-of-breed approach.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Delivered as a Service
Since 2013, we’ve provided a Zenoss-managed offering where the software is delivered as a service (SaaS) along with supporting customer-managed deployments both on premises and in the cloud. In the last 12 months, we’ve experienced record growth in our SaaS business as IT operations teams (including those in historically cloud-averse industries) have moved beyond simply exploring SaaS to requiring SaaS-delivered infrastructure monitoring.
“The trend among vendors is toward a lean IT architecture of SaaS model for setting up ITIM monitoring. At the same time, improved ease of deployment and minimal need for configuration are also seen as necessary features.” (Gartner)
Generally, we’re seeing growing adoption of SaaS solutions by IT operations due to improved enterprise readiness of public cloud providers and services, favorable economics, and vendors such as ServiceNow have proven it’s viable. Beyond these, IT professionals responsible for infrastructure monitoring are choosing SaaS because they know offloading software operation and maintenance to the vendor allows them to devote more time to running the business of IT.
Gartner, Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools, 06 June 2017
