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IT Monitoring Paradox: Let's Step Outside the Bubble!

David Hayward

The world is full of paradoxes. To solve them, you have to look at the facts in a different, even nonconventional way. You have to step outside your bubble.

One of the earliest paradoxes is from the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus. It goes like this: "You cannot step into the same river twice." As Roy Sorenson says in A Brief History of the Paradox, "[Heraclitus] means that you cannot step twice into the same water of a river. There is one river, but many distinct bodies of water flow through it. Heraclitus urges a balance between experience and reason."

Paradoxes are fun to solve, but real-life they can be serious. IT Operations faces paradoxes too, and one in particular day in and day out. Recently, an IT Manager in a FORTUNE 1000 company — let's call him "Joe" — told me that he was called into the distribution center VP's office. The center was at a standstill. Joe showed him that the IT systems supporting the center were meeting all their Service Level Agreements: servers, applications, databases, storage, routers, switches — the whole lot. And the VP's response? "So what. I can’t ship anything."

That's when the light bulb went off in Joe's head. All the IT technologies that underlie the distribution center were running fine, but not the center itself. IT Operations needed another way to look at things, so he could understand the IT environment's status in terms of its impact on the business, not just in terms of how this or that technology silo was behaving.

Like Heraclitus and the river, Joe needed to strike a balance between experience and reason. Joe had plenty of experience — reams of performance monitoring data and proof of SLA compliance for each technology domain — but no way to reason, or monitor, the distribution center business process itself.

Joe started thinking of ITIL — the framework for orienting IT with services, not technologies, in mind. The trouble is, IT operates in a bubble. In fact, lots of bubbles: silo’d teams, silo’d tools, each separately monitoring servers, applications, storage, databases, routers, switches, etc.. No one was monitoring the big picture outside the bubbles. IT Operations Level 1 (the “first line of defense”) was looking at a sea of monitoring screens, events and alerts about technology devices and circuits, and had little or no understanding about how those events and alerts impacted specific business processes.

So even when IT was meeting SLA objectives in each silo, little degradations (i.e., incidents) across silos were adding up and impacting different services (i.e., processes and user experience) in different ways. This was undetectable because there wasn't any way to way to associate all those incidents with specific business services: no operational view and real-time IT operational analytics of business processes across silos.

This is typical. As an analyst from a leading IT research firm recently told me: "The Industry has been trying to solve this problem for decades. It sounds old, but we keep coming back to the same paradox over and over again."

Joe and others like him have embarked on a mission to transform IT Operations from a purely technology monitoring team to a business service reliability monitoring team. They are transforming operations because either they’ll crack the paradox of managing services that they deliver to their business, or the business will outsource operations to someone who can.

Transformation doesn't happen overnight. As the ITIL mantra teaches us, it takes "people, processes and technology" to get IT properly focused on the business and its services. To start, you need to step outside your bubble.

David Hayward is Senior Principal Manager, Solutions Marketing at CA Technologies.

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IT Monitoring Paradox: Let's Step Outside the Bubble!

David Hayward

The world is full of paradoxes. To solve them, you have to look at the facts in a different, even nonconventional way. You have to step outside your bubble.

One of the earliest paradoxes is from the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus. It goes like this: "You cannot step into the same river twice." As Roy Sorenson says in A Brief History of the Paradox, "[Heraclitus] means that you cannot step twice into the same water of a river. There is one river, but many distinct bodies of water flow through it. Heraclitus urges a balance between experience and reason."

Paradoxes are fun to solve, but real-life they can be serious. IT Operations faces paradoxes too, and one in particular day in and day out. Recently, an IT Manager in a FORTUNE 1000 company — let's call him "Joe" — told me that he was called into the distribution center VP's office. The center was at a standstill. Joe showed him that the IT systems supporting the center were meeting all their Service Level Agreements: servers, applications, databases, storage, routers, switches — the whole lot. And the VP's response? "So what. I can’t ship anything."

That's when the light bulb went off in Joe's head. All the IT technologies that underlie the distribution center were running fine, but not the center itself. IT Operations needed another way to look at things, so he could understand the IT environment's status in terms of its impact on the business, not just in terms of how this or that technology silo was behaving.

Like Heraclitus and the river, Joe needed to strike a balance between experience and reason. Joe had plenty of experience — reams of performance monitoring data and proof of SLA compliance for each technology domain — but no way to reason, or monitor, the distribution center business process itself.

Joe started thinking of ITIL — the framework for orienting IT with services, not technologies, in mind. The trouble is, IT operates in a bubble. In fact, lots of bubbles: silo’d teams, silo’d tools, each separately monitoring servers, applications, storage, databases, routers, switches, etc.. No one was monitoring the big picture outside the bubbles. IT Operations Level 1 (the “first line of defense”) was looking at a sea of monitoring screens, events and alerts about technology devices and circuits, and had little or no understanding about how those events and alerts impacted specific business processes.

So even when IT was meeting SLA objectives in each silo, little degradations (i.e., incidents) across silos were adding up and impacting different services (i.e., processes and user experience) in different ways. This was undetectable because there wasn't any way to way to associate all those incidents with specific business services: no operational view and real-time IT operational analytics of business processes across silos.

This is typical. As an analyst from a leading IT research firm recently told me: "The Industry has been trying to solve this problem for decades. It sounds old, but we keep coming back to the same paradox over and over again."

Joe and others like him have embarked on a mission to transform IT Operations from a purely technology monitoring team to a business service reliability monitoring team. They are transforming operations because either they’ll crack the paradox of managing services that they deliver to their business, or the business will outsource operations to someone who can.

Transformation doesn't happen overnight. As the ITIL mantra teaches us, it takes "people, processes and technology" to get IT properly focused on the business and its services. To start, you need to step outside your bubble.

David Hayward is Senior Principal Manager, Solutions Marketing at CA Technologies.

Hot Topics

The Latest

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Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

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