Make a Better Business Case for End-to-End Monitoring

Ted Wilson
Learn more about SL Corporation

Monitoring your middleware platforms with a consolidated monitoring application has been shown over and over to reduce the frequency and duration of severity 1 and 2 incidents and prevent losses of revenue attributed to downtime. However, making a strong business care for end-end monitoring and middleware monitoring can be challenging and can present unique learning opportunities. Here are some recommendations to help you make a better business case.

1. Use tangible benefits and savings only

Annual outage volume, agreed-upon Mean-Time-to-Resolution (MTTR) times, and Service Level Agreement (SLA) penalties are the most common. Soft benefits such as better use of IT resources, reduces damage to the brand, and fewer people on conference calls will certainly provide a benefit, but a hard savings is difficult to quantify and should probably not be included in the financial justification.

One large bank had as many as 115 people on their war room conference calls. And calls averaged several hours with one call last year taking 27 hours! While there is certainly a productivity gain to be made, your finance team is unlikely to agree on a hard savings amount by eliminating some of these calls.

2. Start small and pick the right application for your proof of concept

The “right” application should be one that will bridge the gap between the technology and the business. It is always great if you can quantify results based on your application or service running in your environment.

3. Get your main detractors socialized in this process as early as you can

This is not a popularity contest and you are probably going to be shining a bright light on some problem areas. But your detractors can become your biggest supporters once they are able to work with a common version of the truth that is based on actual performance data. They don’t have to miss out on many war room conferences to see the value in effective end-to-end monitoring.

4. Ensure the financial portion of the business case is conservative

Ensure that the financial portion of the business case is conservative and none of the assumptions can be argued by your finance team. Use internally available data obtained from the business owners, support teams, and your trouble ticketing system administrator. And remember that it is better to underestimate your savings and overestimate your costs. You want to show a fast payback based on conservative numbers that cannot be argued.

Ted Wilson is Chief Operating Officer at SL Corporation.

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Make a Better Business Case for End-to-End Monitoring

Ted Wilson
Learn more about SL Corporation

Monitoring your middleware platforms with a consolidated monitoring application has been shown over and over to reduce the frequency and duration of severity 1 and 2 incidents and prevent losses of revenue attributed to downtime. However, making a strong business care for end-end monitoring and middleware monitoring can be challenging and can present unique learning opportunities. Here are some recommendations to help you make a better business case.

1. Use tangible benefits and savings only

Annual outage volume, agreed-upon Mean-Time-to-Resolution (MTTR) times, and Service Level Agreement (SLA) penalties are the most common. Soft benefits such as better use of IT resources, reduces damage to the brand, and fewer people on conference calls will certainly provide a benefit, but a hard savings is difficult to quantify and should probably not be included in the financial justification.

One large bank had as many as 115 people on their war room conference calls. And calls averaged several hours with one call last year taking 27 hours! While there is certainly a productivity gain to be made, your finance team is unlikely to agree on a hard savings amount by eliminating some of these calls.

2. Start small and pick the right application for your proof of concept

The “right” application should be one that will bridge the gap between the technology and the business. It is always great if you can quantify results based on your application or service running in your environment.

3. Get your main detractors socialized in this process as early as you can

This is not a popularity contest and you are probably going to be shining a bright light on some problem areas. But your detractors can become your biggest supporters once they are able to work with a common version of the truth that is based on actual performance data. They don’t have to miss out on many war room conferences to see the value in effective end-to-end monitoring.

4. Ensure the financial portion of the business case is conservative

Ensure that the financial portion of the business case is conservative and none of the assumptions can be argued by your finance team. Use internally available data obtained from the business owners, support teams, and your trouble ticketing system administrator. And remember that it is better to underestimate your savings and overestimate your costs. You want to show a fast payback based on conservative numbers that cannot be argued.

Ted Wilson is Chief Operating Officer at SL Corporation.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

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The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

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Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

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Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...