Are Your IT Analytics Solving Yesterday’s Problems?

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]By now, most IT executives understand there is hidden value in their IT operations data. According to Gartner and IDC predictions, IT Operations Analytics deployments are about to grow rapidly and become a key component of the enterprise IT architecture over the coming years. As the number of companies using IT Operations Analytics continues its upward trajectory, it is important for IT executives to understand the different ways in which analytics can help them improve IT operations.

Companies using IT Operations Analytics
Source: 2015 IT Operations Analytics Survey

IT Operations Analytics use cases

Gartner describes five use cases for IT Operations Analytics:

1. Model discovery
2. Root cause analysis
3. Impact analysis
4. Event prediction
5. Remedial action recommendations

Applying these use cases to IT infrastructure outage prevention, we can outline the following progression in sophistication and value derived from the different use case of IT Operations Analytics.

The past is important. The future is critical.

No one can refute the value of understanding past events and analyzing them to find the root cause of outages in order to prevent similar disruptions in the future.

However, in today’s fast pace IT environment, analyzing past events is not enough. In this environment, changes are made on a daily basis in order to add capacity, introduce new capabilities, and fix previously identified problems. Each one of these changes inevitably introduces new risks, which could be very different from the ones you have experienced until now.

It is usually not what you expect that is going to hit you. If you are not tracking your current state on a daily basis, you are just letting these risks accumulate until one or more of them are going to explode in your face…

How Predictive IT Operations Analytics can help

In addition to analyzing past events, what really matters is the ability to predict how changes in your current state would impact the future stability and availability of your critical business services—those that affect customers, trade partners, and employees.

Some of the benefits that Predictive IT Operations Analytics can help you achieve include:

• Identify single points of failure and other configuration risks while reducing time and effort associated with pre-rollout testing
• Quickly verify configuration changes once in production and before they impact the business
• Provide IT teams with actionable recommendations for applying best practices and removing availability risks
• Measure KPI’s that support continuous improvement to establish safer and more agile change management practices over time