IT Operations Best Practices

When we think about application performance management, we think of App Owners, App Development, and the people responsible for the care and feeding of the businesses’ application portfolio. What we don’t usually think about is IT Operations. We still think of IT Operations in their traditional role as guardians of the infrastructure, the first responders. We envision them siloed in their NOCs, watching the proverbial Christmas Tree as red and orange and green events pop up.

This perception is not today’s reality. At least not all of it.

The landscape of business is evolving, the demands placed on IT are changing and the opportunity for IT Operations to embrace a bi-modal IT approach is upon us.

IT Operations is Getting Smarter

The world of application performance management is specializing in response to the increasing complexity of web and mobile applications and services.

This is a good thing for the IT Ops world. In the past, applications and infrastructure were managed in a vacuum, but we are seeing a shift. Today, IT Operations has a keen interest in understanding their infrastructure in the context of the application and end-user experience. They care about keeping their services up. And for the first time—the definition of up-time is not driven by the business—it’s driven by the customer. In this world of instant gratification, if an application is sluggish—it may as well be down entirely. The customer won’t wait.

This Isn’t Your Father’s Monitoring

So we have these two core concepts. On one hand we have a need for IT Ops to embrace the two speeds of IT (fast and not so fast), and on the other hand we have the idea of uptime as defined by the customer. How does this play out? We see IT Ops embracing a duality. They are still concerned with keeping the lights on. They still need to deliver on business KPIs and SLAs just as they’ve always done. But the focus is shifting. They are consciously exiting fire-fighter mode. In the past events would pop up and IT Ops would solve for the event and move onto the next. Today IT Ops is adopting tools that help them modernize IT operations so that they can take that traditional approach to infrastructure management to the next level.

What Does Best of Breed Look Like?

So what does excellence look like when it comes to end-user experience and the management of their infrastructure and applications? IT Operations best practices must include these elements and enable the team to:

• Converge the application and infrastructure perspective in a single view
• Easily see which tiers of the application are impacted and drill down into those tiers to begin the triage process
• Begin with the impacted application—IT can cut down the noise and focus on solving the most impacting business problems first

This is why application performance management is so important to IT Ops. They aren’t firefighters chasing the next event. They are finding and fixing problems before customers have a degraded experience. And since customers are now the judge of acceptable uptime, it’s good that IT is managing their data center with end user experience in the forefront.

Want to learn more about how we can help your business thrive on digital change? Check us out at bmc.com/truesightitops.

These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.

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