August 19, 2008

The notion of a single pane of glass – being able to view your entire network & infrastructure from one console – is not new to IT, but over the years it has come to mean different things to different people. On one level it can be as simple as having a more intelligent view of network connectivity – so, for example, if you lose connectivity to a couple dozen servers at the same time as a result of a router failure, you would receive a single alert, not a couple dozen alerts. That kind of correlation has been a giant leap forward toward root cause analysis, and is applied in a number of ways by monitoring software such as Longitude to help detect and diagnose multi-symptom problems (check out tip 4 in our June 9 blog entry on preventing monitoring false alarms)

Today, with IT organizations now focused on delivering business services, the pane of glass is being viewed from a higher level. Whether the underlying cause is the network, a server, a router, a database, or a web site, IT staff need to know what business activity is compromised so they can respond appropriately. Furthermore, IT needs to be able to report to management on performance from a business perspective.