– Vikas Aggarwal, CEO of Zyrion (www.zyrion.com), says:

1. Get management involved and engaged by focusing on business-level monitoring.

It’s best to illustrate the effectiveness of this philosophy by way of example. A US-based managed services provider has implemented a holistic monitoring solution that enables senior management to have simplified business service views (and dashboards) that span multiple departments, whereas the technical staff members have detailed views of the specific devices for which they are responsible. Most outage notifications in the fault-tolerant configurations that have localized alarms are forwarded directly to front-line technical staff to handle, without troubling senior managers. On the other hand, issues that impact mission-critical or cross-departmental aspects of the business are immediately escalated to senior staff so that resources can be allocated and decisions can be made quickly and effectively to prevent subsequent problems. Managers have immediate visibility to the impact on the business, and technical staff do not have to spend an inordinate amount of time justifying remediation investments.

2. It’s time to move beyond just monitoring technical data and metrics.

Legacy network management solutions are centered on monitoring the technical metrics and trends of IT infrastructure and applications. Most organizations continue to rely on these traditional tools for network and enterprise infrastructure monitoring. These solutions have enabled the network operations team to identify problem areas from a technical point-of-view for a given component in the infrastructure, but significant gaps exists in their capabilities to determine the business impact of the identified issues.

IT needs to take a more holistic and service-oriented view of monitoring the enterprise network, server and applications infrastructure, and needs to break free from the “silo” monitoring mentality. Unfortunately, most IT operations teams are not geared to operate in this way. They do not have the required monitoring and enterprise network management solutions to bridge the gap that currently exists between understanding the business service/process impact of problems, and the IT team’s view of what is going on at the technical level. Legacy network management systems and technology-centric monitoring approaches are incapable of determining the business impact of an issue in a complex IT environment, one that may include external cloud services and components as well.