5 BEST PRACTICES FOR ENTERPRISE MONITORING AND MANAGEMENT

How to Successfully Gain a Comprehensive Overview of IT Operations

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Bringing Together Disparate Technology Functions Unplanned Events that Give Rise to Enterprise Monitoring and Management How Enterprise Monitoring and Management Protects Your Business

BEST PRACTICES FOR ENTERPRISE MONITORING AND MANAGEMENT

Understand Your Service Complete Risk AnalysisExecute Dependency MappingImplementationEvaluation

CONCLUSION

Key Takeaways for Enterprise Monitoring and Management

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Bringing Together Disparate Technology Functions

Within the heart of most IT organizations, particularly in the federal space, it’s not uncommon for technology functions to operate disparately. Before the age of the cloud and mass digitalization, life was pretty good for the typical IT manager. Technology assets were often entirely local, and physical hardware and software stacks were constructed according to the particular needs of a given organization.

Today, there’s an IT group for nearly every function of technology, including (but not limited to) hardware, installation, configuration, application implementation, and security—and technology assets are commonly spread across internal data centers, the cloud, and colocated environments. Information technology isn’t so simple anymore, and the complexity creates the need for a more unified view of IT services operations. Without a robust enterprise monitoring and management solution in place, both federal organizations and enterprises open themselves up to a wide array of risks and vulnerabilities.

Unplanned Events that Give Rise to Enterprise Monitoring and Management

Enterprise monitoring and management can be a tricky subject because it’s often a solution that goes unimplemented until some sort of business crisis occurs as a result of technology failure.

It may start with a panicked 2:00 AM phone call from a customer, or some other related business entity who depends on a particular service that is no longer working; then, everyone is scrambling at the last minute to figure out why, or a customer may call the owner or principal manager of an organization in a fury, wanting to know why no one from IT is trying to figure out why an SLA wasn’t upheld.

It’s not a pretty picture. IT personnel go into triage mode, which is usually organized chaos at best. The objective is to stop the bleeding and bring business back into operations.

It usually only takes one or two crisis events for management to decide that more proactive measures need to be taken to prevent further customer dissatisfaction and potential negative impacts to revenue. The time comes to discuss enterprise monitoring and management, and understand the inner workings of IT services holistically.

INTRODUCTION

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An IT failure that causes a business outage could come from any number of malfunctions. A bank may not be able to get money to a customer. An online retailer may experience a payment dysfunction. Whatever the underlying technical issue, there are impacts on both the sides of the business and customer:

» Network stops working» Storage has filled up and disk is too full» A system is over-utilized from a CPU perspective» An environmental issue, such as AC failure, caused overheating» Application stack crashes

How Enterprise Monitoring and Management Protects Your Business

Enterprise monitoring and management enables the ability to understand your IT environment and the general health of technology components that are specifically mapped to the functions of your business. It’s the act of specifying the questions you’re asking about IT operations, and taking quality control from “Is my server or application running okay?” to “As a business, if I’m providing a service, how do I know it’s optimally performing the way that I expect, and the way that my customers expect?”

What’s the monitoring part?Monitoring is the act of collecting the telemetry of all supporting or underlying components and working with system owners to understand what’s important to them, ultimately mapping each technology component to its business function and how it impacts organizational operations as a whole.

What’s the management part?Management is focused on simplification, administration, configuration, and duplication. The goal is to bring together disparate supporting or underlying components that need to be viewed, and over a period of time, gain the ability to consistently duplicate the sensors necessary to gather metrics on systems operations. Ultimately, successful management results in support for security, auditing, and compliance.

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BEST PRACTICES FOR ENTERPRISE MONITORING

AND MANAGEMENTWhatever the reasons for deciding to implement enterprise monitoring and management, the ultimate goal is the same: delivering a centralized, unified view of IT services operations. Your IT team should be able to see the detailed activities of data center operations from a holistic viewpoint, and use a unified method for identifying anomalous IT events.

The right solution will allow you to bring together machine data, logs, and information behind data center processes to form a comprehensive overview of IT activities.

Effective enterprise monitoring and management delivers:

; Smarter monitoring ; Enhanced analytics capabilities ; Faster identification of anomalies ; Optimized IT operations

When you set out on your path to find and implement an enterprise monitoring and management solution that will effectively prevent unforeseen IT events, keep the following best practices in mind.

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UNDERSTAND YOUR SERVICE

Understand what your business is aiming to accomplish. It might sound obvious, but if you don’t have a detailed understanding of what you’re trying to deliver and accomplish from a business perspective, it’s incredibly difficult to pinpoint how technology should support your business, and by extension, what you’re trying to put in place or protect.

Here’s an automobile-related example: if you have the need to travel by car from point A to point B, a Ferrari would probably be a pretty fun ride. However, if you don’t have the means to own a Ferrari, trying to use one to get from point A to point B probably isn’t the best idea, and it won’t be very comfortable. So if your goal is to get from point A to point B in an economical fashion, looking at a mid-range car would be a better option.

Consider another example: think of an online ecommerce store. If you’re the owner, if you want your website to be functioning, and it’s your source for lead generation, revenue, and content, then you have an obligation to ensure that your web portal is up for your customers. It might not be important to you in the sense that the need is at the forefront of your consciousness on a day-to-day basis, but it is an aspect of business you want to make sure is available. Customers need to use your web portal to see products and their order histories, and it’s easy to assume that the internet will always be there.

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COMPLETE RISK ANALYSIS

After determining what your service really entails, it’s helpful to complete a risk analysis exercise to figure out how you’ll know that you’ll be able to keep your systems up and running, as well as how much you’ll have to pay to do so.

Budget is a significant component. In some areas of IT maintenance, a particular service, such as web hosting, may seem affordable on the surface, but will ultimately add up to something beyond what your budget can accommodate for. Knowing the risks you’re most vulnerable to will help you decide how much of your budget to allocate to certain areas.

Between deciding how to keep systems running and determining exposure to risk, there are also smaller components of your service that you’ll need to take into account. Remember to think about your user base, too. If you know you have a website, application, and database, do you also know which people are responsible for the care and feeding of those assets? Is it internal IT personnel, or does problem resolution involve calling technical support? You need to know exactly who is responsible for which systems, and what needs to happen in the event of an issue.

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EXECUTE DEPENDENCY MAPPING

Now is the time to start evaluating what aspects of IT are within your control, and what kind of technology you should be looking at in order to help solve your problems.

You may need to start engaging additional technical professionals to help understand your environment, capabilities, and areas of interdependency. For instance, if your website depends on the local network, storage, and an application, and all of those assets run locally within your environment, then you need to be able to articulate how they’re communicating, and how IT should be testing for whether it’s working.

» Define what constitutes as a good operational state. » Determine how broken technology will be identified.

• Perform component-level testing to determine whether the process is working and healthy.

• Perform functional or transaction-based testing. Execute a complete simulation of the business unit or transaction itself.

» Figure out how much money and time you’re willing to put forward. » If you can’t ensure your necessary level of service internally, consider outsourcing. If

you have internal technical expertise, evaluate other supporting technologies that will monitor functionality consistent with the service you need to deliver.

The goal of dependency mapping is to define normal business operations and determine the actions that need to be taken to support uptime—these components are different for every business, but the process is the same.

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IMPLEMENTATION

When you’ve defined the critical inputs of nontechnical objectives, it’s time to figure out the levels of support and effort your team is willing to implement, and actually do something to make sure that your business is protected.

Implementing enterprise monitoring and management requires a plan and coordination in order to make sure your deployment is in alignment with all of the other details you’ve figured out thus far. Example: if you’re trying to monitor the availability of your website, but monitoring is implemented incorrectly and the wrong website is being tested, you’re not executing on the main objective of your solution.

Make sure you’re taking your inputs and putting pen to paper. Your implementation should include mapping to the planning you’ve done and verifying dependencies. In the end, services and dependencies should be concretely defined, and testing should be completed.

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EVALUATE

Now it’s time to rinse and repeat. You should be ensuring that steps 1-4 were followed and are meeting your objectives continuously.

You should also have a uniform analysis prepared that allows you to evaluate that what you’ve implemented will continue to align with your current business objectives, and whether any adjustments need to be made. Tests that have been put in place should be delivering the intended data and providing feedback on whether anything was executed incorrectly and how to fix it if it was.

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CONCLUSIONKey Takeaways for Enterprise Monitoring and Management

Implementing enterprise monitoring and management can be an arduous process, but once it’s done, your business and IT team will be immensely relieved.

The only problem is, starting out usually isn’t a picnic.

It’s not the case for every customer, but often times, enterprise monitoring and management becomes a consideration after an embarrassing and highly emotional event. It may have resulted in the loss of money, or damage to reputation. Everyone involved knows something has to be done for the betterment of the company, but figuring out why and how often comes back to a finger pointing session aimed at determining who should’ve done something before a crisis happened.

Here’s what we recommend: don’t have that conversation. If a crisis event has already happened, it’s time to check emotions, egos, should’ves, and could’ves at the door, and look at the situation objectively. Even though recovering from an outage or malfunction can be driven by frustration, the process of fixing it has to be data-oriented. In order to sleep at night, embarking on the journey of implementing enterprise monitoring and management requires a commitment to patience and objectivity.

Beyond that, take bite-sized pieces. Unfortunately, you can’t tackle everything at once. It can really be summed up using the old adage: “How do you eat an elephant? …One bite at a time.” Start with what’s important, and eventually, you’ll make sure all components have been covered.

At August Schell Enterprises, we regularly partner with federal and commercial organizations to implement effective enterprise monitoring and management solutions. We understand that in order to keep your data center operating smoothly, you need to integrate all operational data points to create a single view for making intelligent technology solutions. If your organization is interested in learning more about how enterprise monitoring and management can help protect your business, reach out to an August Schell specialist, or call us at (301)-838-9470.

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