November 17, 2008

Given the extent of the economic crisis we hear on the news every day, it’s not surprising that IT organizations are feeling squeezed. When Gartner recently issued a list of 20 ways to tighten IT (Gartner: Top 20 ways to tighten IT, Network World, October 15), it left no stone unturned. Everything - from printers and servers to middle managers and IT service models - is facing tough scrutiny these days. Although it may seem counter-intuitive to invest in any new initiatives such as performance monitoring software, there are good reasons why it can actually help your company’s cost-cutting efforts. Here are 10:

1. By receiving automated, intelligent alerts, you can find and fix problems sooner - this reduces outages and their corresponding downtime costs.
2. Automating routine functions - for example, scouring event logs - frees IT staff to attend to other functions
3. By putting better reports in management’s hands, you can help validate server consolidation plans; plus, if your company does consolidate servers, your systems will be running closer to capacity and will require closer monitoring.
4. By instituting best-practices monitoring with built-in solutions, you can help IT staff to be more effective, especially as they are called upon to cover areas where they have less expertise.
5. If your monitoring software can correlate events (sometimes called cross-silo monitoring), this speeds time to resolution and can put actionable information right at your IT staff’s fingertips.
6. Remote monitoring can reduce the need for IT staff in remote sites.
7. Automated alerting may allow you to reduce staff coverage during off-hours; ditto for corrective action - simple things like restarting services can easily be automated, and then escalated if manual action is necessary.
8. Visibility across multi-tiered applications gives IT management better insight into how IT can increase productivity for the company. Monitoring software with service level knowledge can instantly map problems to the business services they affect, allowing your stretched IT staff to prioritize and focus on what’s most important to the business.
9. Better insight into email usage and other end user habits can help you save money by educating users and implementing guidelines and restrictions where appropriate.
10. Good reporting software will help you differentiate between peak loading issues and chronic overloading of servers. Often, upgrades can be avoided simply by offloading certain operations to other times of day. Monitoring software can also help you differentiate between capacity issues and problems with applications - why buy more hardware when you can optimize the software?

One thing that performance monitoring should NOT do is add overhead to an already-strained infrastructure. Newer, agentless software can help you improve IT service delivery without sapping precious server resources. Agentless software also takes less time to install and deploy - time your staff can spend on other things.

Finally, don’t assume you can’t afford to take on something like performance monitoring when times are lean. Agentless software typically costs less than traditional monitoring software, so it’s probably less an investment than you may imagine. Also, bear in mind that vendors understand the pressures their customers are facing and may be more flexible in their packaging or licensing terms. Good vendors - the ones you stay with - will maintain fair pricing, but will be willing to work with you to arrive at a solution that will fit in your ever-tightening budget

Posted by Rick Lane, Heroix President