IT operations is an area in which consistency and predictability are desired, yet unpredictable, frequent change has become commonplace. Workforces are more mobile, using new devices and new applications to produce endless streams of data that require significant bandwidth and storage capacity. As new tools and services are introduced, IT environments also become more complex. Demands on IT infrastructure and staff increase while budgets tend to stay flat or decrease.
The speed of change, the growing complexity of IT, and ever-increasing expectations have left many IT operations teams struggling to keep up. According to the IT Operations Analytics Benchmark Survey from Continuity Software, the most difficult key performance indicators (KPIs) to meet are performance, uptime, the number of open issues, security breaches and data loss. Only 36 percent of organizations consistently meet or exceed their KPI goals. However, nearly seven in 10 that use analytics tools to measure IT performance are capable of using insights gained to improve IT operations.
More and more IT professionals are realizing traditional approaches to management are unsustainable. Transmitting, processing, storing, securing, analyzing and managing massive volumes of structured and unstructured data in a way that meets today’s demands for speed and efficiency is an enormous undertaking. Automation tools help by handling certain repetitive tasks, but not enough to meet these demands.
Real-time monitoring of the IT environment is essential to maintaining visibility over network traffic, but monitoring alone isn’t enough. You need a way to extract operational value from the information gleaned through monitoring. The ExtraHop platform enables IT to monitor wire data, which is created when the activity and communication between various network systems is automatically converted into a structured data stream that can be analyzed in real time.
Wire data monitoring provides a comprehensive, indisputable source of data from every network tier that enables IT to troubleshoot performance issues, identify and investigate suspicious activity, and spot IT trends. Unlike legacy monitoring solutions, ExtraHop provides real-time visibility into all network application traffic, making it possible for IT to monitor all network devices.
An application performance management (APM) solution is another valuable monitoring tool that enables organizations to manage and optimize the performance and availability of important business applications. Providing visibility from the user’s perspective, APM tools identify the cause of performance bottlenecks and the best path for remediation, which reduces the risk of downtime and productivity drain.
As valuable as monitoring tools and automation are, they’re still part of a bigger solution. IT operations analytics (ITOA) enables organizations to be more proactive in managing and analyzing data, performance, availability and security, and make more informed operational decisions in complex IT environments. In the next post, we’ll take a deeper dive into ITOA, explain the importance of shifting from tool-driven to data-driven IT practices, and discuss the correlation between ITOA and DevOps.
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