Heroix has created a handy excel spreadsheet to work out the return on investment for Longitude monitoring. The spreadsheet is not 100% applicable to every company’s situation, but it provides a framework for considering that nothing is truly “free.”

I am a little unusual for an IT manager in that I AM an intuitive thinker. I “trust my gut,” on many things, but I have learned the perils of intuition over time and recognize the value of reducing assumptions to data and models. As a skeptic, I can dismiss some calculations as impractical–but the exercise of actually stating assumptions and putting dollar values on them is helpful to recognize trade offs.

We can estimate that a certain percentage of an engineer’s time is spent putting out fires that could have been avoided. We can make assumptions about the cost to business of downtime–when uptime is resulting in revenue. And the solutions that were developed for free–we really need to consider how much time was spent creating and maintaining them–and what was not done during that time. Armed with data, we can talk about what choices are really being made and begin to compare the “free” alternatives to the paid ones.

• Download the ROI Analyzer Tool
• Read Heroix Best Practices Guide
• Listen to Podcast: The ROI of Switching