A fresh look at IT and business services

The last couple of years, we have seen several fantastic developments in the world of IT, systems are more and more being integrated (hyper converged) and standardized. At first sight this is great: there are less building blocks which can do more. There are fewer self-made management scripts in the IT-teams and thus less apprenticeship for new team members. Your network supplier now also provides computer services, developers create easy-to-use images which can be used in a production environment themselves. The IT-landscape becomes top-notch streamlined and in theory even faster and better.

The reality, however, is less positive. On an architecture level everything does become less complex, but on administrator-lever fewer solutions are available. Just try to find an administrator who really knows the solutions in detail. Troubleshooting can no longer be done without hiring a hyper expert, integration and standardization require specialists.

How can we help these administrators and how can we optimize the deployment of specialists? Insight and transparency are the key to success. We provide the administrators data that helps them to move on. This data is hidden in silos and can be disclosed with different tools, and from different environments. This data will only become information if we create an overall picture of this, across tools and environments.

To limit the impact of a problem on your environment you want:

• An administrator to be able to see where in the chain a problem is caused, so he can immediately contact the needed specialist. For example: if a problem with payment at a web shop originates with the deployment of another type EC2 instance at the DevOps team.
• A ticket to be automatically created, so the specialist receives a notification to have a look at the database if it suddenly shows different behavior.
• To see which services are potentially going to have a specific problem with the database and what impact this has on revenue, service centers, user experiences and reputation.

This is only possible with a modern solution that consolidates data from the entire technical environment. This data can be shown at many different levels of abstraction; from basic logs and metrics to a high-level status dashboard. A solution that logically links these abstraction levels together, so you can down-drill cross functions. A solution that makes machine learning accessible and applies where it is really useful. A solution that notifies the specialist if something strange is going on before it has an impact.

This article was originally written for and published at SMT