How much time gets wasted between finding an issue and fixing the problem?
Enterprise technicians, multi-hat solo admins, and field technicians all know that there is no easy answer to that question. If there is an end-user involved, you can only hope that you are getting more than “it won’t work” for an answer. For everything else, you can only hope that your logs make sense and that you’ll have all the tools necessary.
There are too much guesswork and luck involved in modern technology, even in the age of automation. To speed up service while keeping performance consistent, consider a few of these IT operations and general monitoring tips.
How Does Any of That Help?
If you’re not dealing with the massive mountains of data, the problem may seem significant, but distant. Big data means big storage and big bandwidth, and while saving money on storage and network infrastructure is great, you’ll need to scale up eventually.
Unfortunately, you have bigger problems when your data management becomes too big. With too much data and not enough timely decisions, multiple parts of your team can miss the mark.
Developers may need to test how specific changes affect the big picture, and a lot of their time-saving can be done before running a single line. By knowing what affects your systems now in real-time instead of relying on raw numbers and instructions, truly talented developers can work by “feel” as they check system feedback and consider the code requirements.
In hardware maintenance, technicians can get better information about which hardware seems to fail sooner in certain situations, or what could work better with the development team’s project.
A high-data project could lead to SSDs draining their lifecycle from high amounts of access that a hard drive could handle. General IT staff may notice that not only specific programs but certain plugins or certain user actions have an adverse effect just by getting better info from reports.
Even field technicians far from the operations center can benefit from reports about their sites. Whether it’s a client who has problems with specific software deployments or a cell tower that times out with an incorrect timing setting in new code, technicians can both analyze and report their manual findings with a better suite.
Fewer Tools, Greater Solutions
How many tools does your management team use to make a single decision?
Do they pull reports from one system while matching it with another? Are there two or three reporting apps that come together like pieces of a puzzle when handled by the right leadership, but refuse to combine on their own?
The rising age of automation gave birth to a lot of amazing ideas. Digging through Docker, Vagrant, Jenkins, Apache, Visual Studio, Chef, Puppet, and Ansible are both necessary for career growth, but often necessary for different projects within the same business.
If you’re a service provider, who must hack and splice different tools for different clients, juggling everything can be a hassle. If you’re not working through conflicts, there’s latency and bizarre output issues that lead to a jumbled mess.
Even if you have everything connected and planned in an elegant path, how much data is cranking out of your organization? Even though storage is getting cheaper, you could do more with less by pushing out junk data and creating a more agile work process.
Implementing Zenoss Cloud
Instead of hiring more analysts to pore over large automation data pools and engineers to manage that artificial intelligence, tools such as Zenoss Cloud exist to bring it all together. Zenoss bridges machine learning with the often-strangled jungle of data that comes from too many—but too vital—tools in your environment.
How? Zenoss Cloud gathers and adds context to all data types available. Making sense of the sea of events, errors, network performance data, and other rivers of information is a massive ordeal on its own, and Zenoss can take a heavy burden off analysts and DevOps managers cobbling together a makeshift set of macros.
To some, this might sound like yet another tool in the toolbox. Why add this one? Well, Zenoss isn’t just another tool in the toolbox—it’s a great toolbox!
The system offers seamless integration with other ITOM technologies and has a virtually unlimited scale. That doesn’t just mean building and shrinking your data management as needed; segment your projects and create black boxes of data management for projects that demand security.
There is now no need for another tool that handles secure and non-secure data and no need for separate training for your isolated systems. It’s all in one suite, scalable and snappable.
Contact a DevOps data management professional to schedule a demo at Zenoss today to discuss other benefits of a robust, powerful SaaS platform.
