Glyn Heath, Founder of Centiq Ltd, speaks to IT Advisor.

The benefits of IT monitoring and the early warning of system issues.

monitoring, managing and mitigating risk

IT managers and CIOs are under daily pressure to keep company business systems going. They have to maintain 24/7 IT services to drive growth, keep their customers satisfied or defend market share. With their C-level colleagues, they know they will have to invest at some point in custom-made business technology systems or the migration to new technology platforms. But, many IT managers lack the hard evidence to prove either that their technology systems are supporting corporate development objectives or the effective performance of those investments going forward.

If you do not monitor your technology systems, you have no early warning of capacity or provisioning issues as the organisation grows organically, acquires a competitor or downsizes. The CIO will have no overview of the impact on the business should there be a system failure. How can you check that your technology systems are in a healthy state? How can you see the ‘vital signs’ without impeding the daily operations?

The leading technology vendors have developed monitoring systems, but these are typically enterprise and government-scale platforms that demand intensive upfront investment and sustained allocation of inhouse resources to manage them. Smaller organisations have to blend vendor offerings with their own inhouse monitoring processes. In such instances it is not uncommon for the IT function to struggle to make progress towards holistic checks because of the way staff resources and computing assets are structured or divided up. In these circumstances, and with the daily pressures of problem-solving tasks, it’s no surprise that IT staff resources are more focused on specific areas and immediate performance issues; they have little system insight.

It’s not surprising that some IT consultants believe that serious IT performance issues, process breakdowns and systems outages can become apparent in organisations with no more than 100 users or a 20 server infrastructure. In many organisations IT systems are based on many disparate hardware and software systems; it becomes more complicated to manage, and effective monitoring is required as time goes on and more systems are added to the IT infrastructure.

Many organisations struggle to gain an effective snapshot of their technology systems and then make sense of them. IT professionals are not helped by growing external influences on their colleagues’ daily needs. Board-level executives may compare outdated corporate applications with cloud services or the ‘consumerised’ IT of smartphones. Yet many senior IT professionals never develop a practical framework for gauging the performance and business contribution of key business applications, and identifying the ones they can outsource or retire altogether.

Because of these different operational and commercial pressures, IT departments often lack the ability to look forward strategically and don’t repeat or embed monitoring tools within their operations to identify potential problems or future capacity issues. Beyond the usual service level agreements (SLAs) and maintenance, annual or other long-term system healthchecks are often not even considered. In a project-oriented world – where you only get project-driven budgets – monitoring runs across different systems. Organisations are failing to build early warning systems that could protect them against system outages or unforeseen events. Most IT directors that build bespoke IT platforms will no doubt negotiate or carve out system testing from vendors and ISVs beyond the immediate demands of the implementation. But what happens in the months and years afterwards?

Any organisation making substantial IT investment should be monitoring its technology systems to achieve strategic insight of what they deliver – and can provide going forward. This is one of the practical foundations for helping UK businesses enhance their technology performance, meet corporate business objectives and reduce overall exposure to risk. However, this core requirement is being lost between different demands, including 24/7 service expectations, cost constraints, resource-heavy best practice models and the burden of industry regulation.

Why monitor?

Demonstrating value for money in IT purchases is too often about justifying upfront hardware and software costs, rather than measuring related productivity boosts. It’s surprising that so few organisations generate statistics to measure the expensive technology systems they have deployed. Despite IT typically being one of their organisation’s biggest investments, C-level executives expect to keep systems going without having to question much beyond vendors’ and service providers’ claims. However, this trust in vendors and a general focus on immediate workloads, means they are failing to build true system monitoring and capacity planning capabilities into or around these investments.

Company boards have little idea of how their IT assets contribute to the organisation’s bottom line. However, by deploying ever more complex computing environments, CIOs are actually increasing the overall risk to their business by failing to look ahead to potential system issues. Repeated server crashes, creaking databases and slow network performance could be the first signs of serious infrastructure stress and poorly managed resources, and not simply one-off incidents to be quickly patched-up and forgotten about. This lack of foresight goes against a board’s general duty of scrutiny.

Rethinking IT processes

More seasoned IT professionals remember the conventions governing the allocation and use of the organisation’s computing resources in the mainframe era. Computing resources were assigned by the IT team according to central capacity. The rise of distributed computing models never saw the same control mechanisms. In the 21st century, the shift to core information delivery at the individual device or system access point level is becoming the norm. Service maturity models like ITIL were developed in the 1990s to help larger organisations to realign and refine processes with technology resources as distributed environments became commonplace. For company healthcheck purposes, you have to ask yourself whether such resource-heavy IT maturity models have practical use in a world of government cutbacks or volatile trading conditions.

These different IT industry trends militate against setting up assessment to understand IT’s contribution to the organisation’s performance. They are accentuated by the ‘consumerisation’ of IT. Why should a company bother with complex tools to examine the floods of data in their organisation when a clever programmer could build a ‘quick fix’ enquiry application to run on an iPad or a smartphone? There is a lack of demand from C-level executives (even some CIOs) to monitor their systems and deliver statistics that could benchmark their IT system’s performance – and how it could be fine-tuned to support the business’ future growth plans more cost-effectively.

Britain’s continuing economic uncertainty renders IT assessment especially difficult. Private firms have made sweeping cost reductions beyond their annual cost cuts and the Coalition Government’s budget reduction has placed budgetary constraints not seen in decades on public sector IT directors. Some observers might say that the scope for establishing regular IT monitoring for capacity planning is believed to be impractical or perhaps even irrelevant given this very challenging backdrop. It is overshadowed by repeated rebudgeting based on reduced headcount and fewer locations – and in the public sector, enforced sharing of resources with partners to keep services going.

Industry regulation could be a positive influence towards companies achieving a sensible overview of IT operations. When a financial regulator or governmental agency demands data or records, business and suppliers will clearly maintain network and transactional metrics to help achieve compliance. However, such compliance tactics are about avoiding fines or legal sanctions rather than a drive for best practice.

Ultimately, monitoring the IT infrastructure and application performance will provide the insight necessary to keep business systems running in an optimal state. Many businesses rely on their users notifying them of a problem, but monitoring allows the identification and resolution of issues before business services are adversely affected.

On a performance level, monitoring ensures that IT systems are in good working order and helps to identify states that could undermine service levels provided to the end user. But, the ability to analyse historical trends and enhance the understanding of how the system is really being utilised over time gives businesses the invaluable evidence on which they can base forward planning – using factual data and avoiding the ‘finger-in-the-air’ guesswork that sometimes accompanies new IT investments.

Key questions

IT departments need to ask themselves the following key questions to minimise risk from ongoing technology investments:

1. Does your business have documented customer service expectations and minimum service levels that support them?
2. Do you have regular meetings to review customer satisfaction levels, processes and technology assets?
3. Can your outsourced IT provider or other solution provider deliver performance metrics that show the contribution of their systems to your business?
4. Do you have the ability to monitor cross-platform to provide externally oriented, business-focused multiple-level metrics that help the board assess the health of your technology assets and provide early warning of potential issues associated with them?

If the answer to any of these, but especially the last question, is ‘no’, then your business could be struggling to detect early warnings of system capacity issues or plan the way your IT infrastructure supports the board’s vision for core business operations. Monitoring your investment is the way to start managing risk and providing the much-hyped agile IT operation.

The author

Glyn Heath is managing director of Centiq, which designs, implements and supports smarter infrastructures built on leading technology from both IBM and HP. Glyn founded the company more than 12 years ago and it has a successful track record supporting UK blue-chip and mid-range customers in the technology, retail, manufacturing and business services sectors.

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