IT Operations professionals are now facing overwhelming amounts of infrastructure-related changes - such as hardware upgrades, OS patching, software upgrades, and server consolidations.
Based on the results of a recent survey conducted by Evolven, The IT Operations Analytics Report offers valuable insights into the challenges facing IT Operations, and how IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) can address these issues .
How Many of Your Incidents are Related to Changes?
With IT systems becoming more complex and more critical to keeping the business available, how are companies prepared to make sure performance does not suffer?
82% of IT professionals surveyed experienced at least one unplanned outage in the past 24 months due to changes that were difficult to investigate.
Between applications, environments, and individual instances, mistakes and unauthorized changes happen, demanding that IT Ops spend significant amounts of time managing configuration values.
The more complex the environment, the longer it takes to rectify or recover from downtime, with one of the first questions usually asked being “What changed?”
For many in IT Operations, as we saw from our survey, the answer to this question is difficult to reach, requiring detailed information. IT teams find themselves in a never-ending chase to keep up with the pace of change across the IT landscape. IT organizations are increasingly recognizing, as the survey results show, that a proactive approach to risk identification is more effective for outage prevention than playing catch-up.
What Tools are Key to Achieving IT Operations Excellence?
Today’s increasingly complex environments simply can’t be managed effectively through traditional processes. Likewise, information should not be siloed, and enterprise systems should not be disparate and disconnected. Looking to increase efficiency and minimize errors caused by change, IT organizations are looking to enhance their configuration management.
76% of IT professionals surveyed say tools that analyze IT configuration issues are the key to IT operations performance.
Configuration inconsistencies and unauthorized changes cause the most extreme challenges in IT. At the same time, the pressures faced by IT are only increasing. On one hand, IT teams are being asked to hold down spending, while expected to improve service quality.
Organizations have seen the following issues result from poor configuration management:
■ Increased reactive support issues and lower availability
■ Inability to determine user impact from changes
■ Increased time to resolve problems
■ Higher costs due to unused components
What Use Case Types Would You Find Most Valuable for Leveraging ITOA?
As companies face increased IT complexity, which is slowing progress and placing strain on IT staff, they are seeking to get the most value out of their day-to-day IT operations.
88% of IT professionals surveyed see the value of IT Operations Analytics as being applied to common IT Operations use cases.
The vast majority of the IT professionals surveyed consider IT analytics to be the best solution for addressing IT’s big data challenges.
IT Operations Analytics can be effectively applied to many common use cases in IT Operations, such as:
■ Change Management: Perform sanity checks to determine the probability of success before any change is executed.
■ Configuration Management: Detect discrepancies from desired configuration (drift) and reduce risk to environment stability.
■ Incident Management: Reduce incident response time and help eliminate incidents from occurring, transforming the investigation process by automatically analyzing all changes that occurred since the system worked fine, applying pattern and statistics based algorithms to identify an incident’s root-cause.
■ Problem Management: Reach root cause, or a probable cause, identification faster.
IT Operations Analytics Helps
IT Operations Analytics can end the chronic change and configuration challenges facing IT Operations today. The takeaway is that analytics are crucial to IT evolution and business success.
Sasha Gilenson is the Founder and CEO of Evolven Software.