How Top Performing Organizations Do IT Operations Management

According to a 2017 study, 55% of organizations are looking to improve the accuracy, timeliness and relevance of IT alerting, notification and IT operations management. Alerting is a key component of IT operations management and readiness. Second only to cloud, IT monitoring and IT alerting are believed to be the most important monetary investment for achieving digital transformation readiness.

Unfortunately, the current IT alerting systems often used are unable to provide the necessary accuracy, intelligence and mitigation that ITOps  needs. The question then is should organizations simply look to upgrade the pagers they use for alerting? Or, alternatively, should companies look to invest in a platform that ensures their alert readiness and plants the steps for them to achieve digital readiness of their IT operations?

The goal of this blog is to answer these questions and provide insight into how to improve the accuracy, timeliness and relevance of IT alerting and notifications. To establish a better understanding of what this improvement looks like though, we’ll first establish how top performing IT organizations manage their alerting.

How do top performing organizations do IT Operations management

Organizations are looking for more intelligence and context from IT alerting. Top performing organizations see the provision of this information as a source of competitive advantage and often have developed a well-defined strategy for digitalizing and transforming key business processes as a result of this information. Indeed, these organization focus their digital formation (or transformation) around these precepts.

With added complexity and ongoing change, it becomes increasingly important to monitor more and more parts of the overall IT operations stack. Because of the increase in monitoring, organizations need to see an increase in alerting capabilities as well and also be able to provide that alerting in real time.

Steps taken by top organizations

The alerting platform used by top organizations is not simply an updated pager. As these organizations have realized, pagers don’t provide the robustness and intelligence which a modern IT operations management requires. These organizations have also realized that alert readiness plants the steps for them to ensure digital readiness.

Top IT organizations need to be able to look at an alerting platform and know that the platform will provide them with the appropriate level of awareness they need to ensure IT operations are not impacted. The following list highlights some of the areas which IT needs to find in their alerting platform if they wish to achieve digital readiness through their alerting notifications.

Step 1: Ability to generate contextual alerts– Contextual alerting means that the appropriate level of information is provided about:

• alert severity
• when the incident occurred
• the impact of the event or outage on the stack.

Users want to be able to recognize the difference between inconsequential anomalies and actual performance problems.

IT doesn’t need more alerts. They have plenty of those. Instead, IT managers need alerts that indicate actual performance problems and severity. By providing this level of insight when the alert is delivered, recipients know what actions they need to take. If the alert is a low-priority issue the engineer can take care of the problem at their leisure. However, if the issue is pressing, high priority alert such as a key API malfunction, then the engineer’s alert should indicate the performance deterioration that is occurring.

Step 2:  SaaS delivery method for IT Operations Management solutions-For alerting to be effective, the delivering platform needs to be a cloud-based Saas technology. Imagine what would happen if the power failed at the facility hosting an on-premise alerting solution? How would the team get alerted then? For most IT operations, this level of insecurity is unacceptable.

Organizations need to ensure they have the most frequent upgrades and that they can easily expand licenses. This level of flexibility is much easier to achieve with a Saas model for alerting.

Conclusion

IT sees monitoring and alerting as a significant investment which they must undertake in order to improve their readiness for digital transformation. Modern business requires this of them. With this level of preparedness, organizations can subsequently have the level of speed, agility, scale and responsiveness to deliver unique customer experiences. This shift makes operational and systems readiness necessary factors to success.

Readiness, as this whitepaper has shown, means that your alerting technology is in place and able to provide the appropriate workflow during an incident and the reporting after an incident to ensure money is not wasted and customers are not lost. The alerting platform chosen needs to be able to provide the necessary level of automation, information and responsiveness that IT teams need to achieve digital success.

To read more about IT operations management best practices, read our whitepaper How Top Performing Organizations Manage IT Operations.