When it Comes to Your IT Infrastructure, it Literally Pays to Be Able to See the Whole Picture

When it comes to managing your IT services, time is money. The longer it takes to fix a problem, the more users and services are impacted.

There are economic costs and then there are reputational costs. Costs of service delivery delays or outages, for instance, can accumulate rapidly. Not only in terms of the revenue you lose, but also for the credibility of your service delivery capabilities – your brand.

How can you prevent these costs?

Before you can do anything to fix a problem, you need to be able to see the whole picture. That is, you need a bird’s-eye view of your entire infrastructure. But you also need to be able to drill down quickly to identify the root cause of the issue.

Gaps in visibility adversely affect your ability to get to the source of an issue. This can delay – if not make it impossible – to resolve issues in a timely fashion.

If time and money are concerns for you, you should consider sophisticated infrastructure management solutions such as the Optanix Platform.

The platform has the ability to discover and gather time-sensitive data from applications, systems, devices and other domain-specific management solutions that together make up the IT infrastructure supporting your users, customers and revenue-generating services.

As the platform builds a picture of the infrastructure, it identifies specific components and determines the best way to monitor them by taking into account the scale and scope of the source.

This is accomplished by the use of Automated Logic Profiles (ALPs) that encapsulate IT operations monitoring best practices in templates that can be automatically applied across a wide variety of infrastructure elements.

As your network grows and new devices are added and new services are deployed, new gaps are introduced. In this case, the discovery and monitoring capabilities of the Optanix Platform, driven by ALPs, ensures that your end-to-end visibility is not compromised and your infrastructure is able to evolve.

As each new source comes on line and is identified, the best practices to monitor that device or service are on hand to rapidly bring visibility into the health and welfare of the device.

Gathering data from every possible source in the ecosystem provides a comprehensive approach to the management of the infrastructure. And it is no doubt essential to be able to see the entire IT infrastructure.

But what makes the Optanix approach stand apart is not only that it enables visibility, but that is has the ability to group elements into logical entities that describe the business services built upon the infrastructure.

This ability to abstract infrastructure elements onto the corresponding business service provides powerful visualization capabilities. Now you are able to understand which services are affected when a particular part of the infrastructure – or even a single device – goes down.

Rather than being told a particular device is down, IT teams get a clear idea what the actual impact to the business is.

Now that you can see the whole picture, do you comprehend what you see? Next week we’ll look at tools that make it easier for you to identify and understand your IT infrastructure issues.