* IT managers must see a problem coming and prevent it from impacting business services
When it comes to today’s dynamic environments, it’s not enough to resolve problems quickly: IT managers must see the problem coming and prevent it from impacting business services.
This type of predictive management isn’t new among IT wish lists, but the capabilities haven’t been quite as necessary in past IT shops as they are today. Operational efficiencies today aren’t simply driven by cost cutting measures; now IT needs to streamline how it works to optimize networks, systems and applications for the business — because the business is watching. Unfortunately for IT, budgets haven’t increased tenfold and the software and tools (compare Network Monitoring and Management products here) they have in place may not be up for the challenge of predictive analysis in multi-tiered environments.
“Most infrastructure managers know that more sophisticated event identification and analytics will enable them to jump from reactive to proactive event management, and that having a more service savvy infrastructure will improve productivity and service performance,” says Jasmine Noel, principal analyst at research firm Ptak, Noel and Associates. “It is just that corporate reality gets in the way of doing this, since more IT organizations get stuck between the choice of rip-replace-relearn (which can be risky and immediately expensive) and creating an unmaintainable patchwork of new and old monitoring, analytics and service modeling capabilities (which will be expensive in the long run).”
Despite IT operations managers realizing many of the tools they have in place now can’t tackle the management challenges they face going forward, they aren’t entirely free to overhaul their systems. Most understand that a rip-and-replace approach to updating systems is too costly and not guaranteed to deliver results. So what’s an IT manager to do?
BMC would say take a look at some new capabilities it recently introduced that incorporate technology from its ProactiveNet acquisition completed earlier this year. The buy was part of a flurry of acquisitions BMC accomplished, including the purchase of run-book automation vendor RealOps and network configuration management player Emprisa Networks. While RealOps gave BMC automation tools.
The ProactiveNet buy enabled BMC to collect and deliver relevant data on performance that IT operations’ managers need before an outage occurs. Recently BMC announced a product about the ProactiveNet technology dubbed BMC ProactiveNet Analytics. The software is said to include self-learning capabilities that can reduce time from problem detection to resolution by up to 90%, and the software integrates with multiple third-party event management solutions to prevent the need to rip-and-replace existing tools, BMC says.
The software correlates “thousands” of data points from applications and devices monitored across the IT infrastructure and when an issue is detected the software automatically providers a list of potential and probable causes for the service or performance degradation. These capabilities, BMC says, helps IT managers reduce the time it take to sort through myriad events and prioritize the problems that need to be addressed. Industry watchers agree saying BMC is giving IT managers a pragmatic option to moving toward proactive, predictive analysis and management — without having to overhaul existing systems and tools entirely.
“BMC’s strategy is to provide infrastructure managers with an alternative — an analytics engine with built-in service modeling that can be deeply integrated with existing tools in a maintainable way,” Noel says.
