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Event Management: Reactive, Proactive or Predictive?

Larry Dragich

Can event management help foster a curiosity for innovative possibilities to make application performance better? Blue-sky thinkers may not want to deal with the myriad of details on how to manage the events being generated operationally, but could learn something from this exercise.

Consider the major system failures in your organization over the last 12 to 18 months. What if you had a system or process in place to capture those failures and mitigate them from a proactive standpoint preventing them from reoccurring? How much better off would you be if you could avoid the proverbial “Groundhog Day” with system outages? The argument that system monitoring is just a nice to have, and not really a core requirement for operational readiness, dissipates quickly when a critical application goes down with no warning.

Starting with the Event management and Incident management processes may seem like a reactive approach when implementing an Application Performance Management (APM) solution, but is it really? If “Rome is burning”, wouldn’t the most prudent action be to extinguish the fire, then come up with a proactive approach for prevention? Managing the operational noise can calm the environment allowing you to focus on APM strategy more effectively.

Asking the right questions during a post-mortem review will help generate dialog, outlining options for alerting and prevention. This will direct your thinking towards a new horizon of continual improvement that will help galvanize proactive monitoring as an operational requirement.

Here are three questions that build on each other as you work to mature your solution:

1. Did we alert on it when it went down, or did the user community call us?

2. Can we get a proactive alert on it before it goes down, (e.g. dual power supply failure in server)?

3. Can we trend on the event creating a predictive alert before it is escalated, (e.g. disk space utilization to trigger a minor@90%, major@95%, critical@98%)?

The preceding questions are directly related to the following categories respectively: Reactive, Proactive, and Predictive.

Reactive – Alerts that Occur at Failure

Multiple events can occur before a system failure; eventually an alert will come in notifying you that an application is down. This will come from either the users calling the Service Desk to report an issue or it will be system generated corresponding with an application failure.

Proactive – Alerts that Occur Before Failure

These alerts will most likely come from proactive monitoring to tell you there are component failures that need attention but have not yet affected overall application availability, (e.g. dual power supply failure in server).

Predictive – Alerts that Trend on a Possible Failure

These alerts are usually set up in parallel with trending reports that will help predict subtle changes in the environment, (e.g. trending on memory usage or disk utilization before running out of resources).

Image removed.

Conclusion

Once you build awareness in the organization that you have a bird’s eye view of the technical landscape and have the ability to monitor the ecosystem of each application (as an ecologist), people become more meticulous when introducing new elements into the environment. They know that you are watching, taking samples, and trending on the overall health and stability leaving you free to focus on the strategic side of APM without distraction.

You can contact Larry on LinkedIn

Related Links:

For a high-level view of a much broader technology space refer to the slide show on BrightTALK.com which describes the “The Anatomy of APM - webcast” in more context.

For more information on the critical success factors in APM adoption and how this centers around the End-User-Experience (EUE), read The Anatomy of APM and the corresponding blog APM’s DNA – Event to Incident Flow.

Prioritizing Gartner's APM Model

APM and MoM – Symbiotic Solution Sets

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Event Management: Reactive, Proactive or Predictive?

Larry Dragich

Can event management help foster a curiosity for innovative possibilities to make application performance better? Blue-sky thinkers may not want to deal with the myriad of details on how to manage the events being generated operationally, but could learn something from this exercise.

Consider the major system failures in your organization over the last 12 to 18 months. What if you had a system or process in place to capture those failures and mitigate them from a proactive standpoint preventing them from reoccurring? How much better off would you be if you could avoid the proverbial “Groundhog Day” with system outages? The argument that system monitoring is just a nice to have, and not really a core requirement for operational readiness, dissipates quickly when a critical application goes down with no warning.

Starting with the Event management and Incident management processes may seem like a reactive approach when implementing an Application Performance Management (APM) solution, but is it really? If “Rome is burning”, wouldn’t the most prudent action be to extinguish the fire, then come up with a proactive approach for prevention? Managing the operational noise can calm the environment allowing you to focus on APM strategy more effectively.

Asking the right questions during a post-mortem review will help generate dialog, outlining options for alerting and prevention. This will direct your thinking towards a new horizon of continual improvement that will help galvanize proactive monitoring as an operational requirement.

Here are three questions that build on each other as you work to mature your solution:

1. Did we alert on it when it went down, or did the user community call us?

2. Can we get a proactive alert on it before it goes down, (e.g. dual power supply failure in server)?

3. Can we trend on the event creating a predictive alert before it is escalated, (e.g. disk space utilization to trigger a minor@90%, major@95%, critical@98%)?

The preceding questions are directly related to the following categories respectively: Reactive, Proactive, and Predictive.

Reactive – Alerts that Occur at Failure

Multiple events can occur before a system failure; eventually an alert will come in notifying you that an application is down. This will come from either the users calling the Service Desk to report an issue or it will be system generated corresponding with an application failure.

Proactive – Alerts that Occur Before Failure

These alerts will most likely come from proactive monitoring to tell you there are component failures that need attention but have not yet affected overall application availability, (e.g. dual power supply failure in server).

Predictive – Alerts that Trend on a Possible Failure

These alerts are usually set up in parallel with trending reports that will help predict subtle changes in the environment, (e.g. trending on memory usage or disk utilization before running out of resources).

Image removed.

Conclusion

Once you build awareness in the organization that you have a bird’s eye view of the technical landscape and have the ability to monitor the ecosystem of each application (as an ecologist), people become more meticulous when introducing new elements into the environment. They know that you are watching, taking samples, and trending on the overall health and stability leaving you free to focus on the strategic side of APM without distraction.

You can contact Larry on LinkedIn

Related Links:

For a high-level view of a much broader technology space refer to the slide show on BrightTALK.com which describes the “The Anatomy of APM - webcast” in more context.

For more information on the critical success factors in APM adoption and how this centers around the End-User-Experience (EUE), read The Anatomy of APM and the corresponding blog APM’s DNA – Event to Incident Flow.

Prioritizing Gartner's APM Model

APM and MoM – Symbiotic Solution Sets

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...