Yes, it’s Possible: Your IT Infrastructure Management Platform Should Help Alleviate Your Guesswork.

You probably know that Benjamin Franklin said, “Time is money.” But did you know he is also the sage responsible for this equally meaningful, but slightly lesser known, chestnut: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

When it comes to IT infrastructure management, time is of the essence.

The longer it takes to resolve an outage, the more severe the impact to the services that are providing value to your business. As you know, delays in remediating issues can result in reduced levels of service delivery and decreased customer satisfaction.

IT organizations need to run their business on a predictable IT service delivery infrastructure. After all, your service delivery is your business. The best way to do this is by removing the guesswork and knowing exactly how to proceed when you face issues in the network: What are you fixing, how are you fixing it, who is fixing it.

You need to focus on what matters, right away. You need to know – not guess.

So what exactly does it mean to “know”? Let’s break it down into three fundamental elements:

1. Know exactly what the state of your network is and what the true root cause of an issue is.

Your IT infrastructure management platform needs to know how to manage large volumes of event data. This helps it to rapidly focus on “interesting” data points. Once these are identified, the next series of steps involves analyzing the data to pinpoint root cause events.

However, this is just the beginning. In order to truly know and not guess, it helps if the platform goes the additional step to verify that the issue still persists, and to validate that the root cause is the actual source of the problem.

2. Know the remediation steps. That is, what to fix in what order.

Once the root cause of the issue is identified, verified and validated, it helps to know exactly what steps will be taken to fix the issue. Captured intelligence encoded into workflows are a great way to rapidly get to the proper remediation steps.

Today’s leading platforms can even automate these workflows on demand to automatically perform the right steps to remedy the problem. Further, they will build the workflows by tapping into existing domain knowledge.

In fact, in this instance, knowing not guessing means having a readily accessible portfolio of workflows that clearly outline the appropriate remediation steps for your team.

3. Know the business services affected by outages in the underlying technical infrastructure.

When your technical infrastructure goes down, business services riding on them are of course going to be impacted. Oftentimes, the relationship between the two may not be readily identifiable. The ability to know exactly what services are affected – and how they impact your users and customers – is invaluable. It increases your uptime and helps you to manage expectations properly.

Knowing exactly which services are affected by an outage helps to better manage the communications around service restorations and the direct impact to users. Most importantly, this has a direct correlation to improving customer satisfaction levels.

Today’s IT infrastructure management platforms are sophisticated and enormously capable. But can they help you know, not guess? As any IT team member can tell you, it’s an invaluable feature.

Because after all, “Time lost is never found again.”