Traditional IT teams are facing more changes than ever before because services, such as cloud, functions, and containers have become easily accessible, usable, and scalable for every business. Although this change will eventually make the IT professional’s life much easier, the transition to this end-goal comes with many challenges. For example, the IT team now needs to work hard to maintain rigor and discipline over change processes, and implement cloud services into existing IT infrastructure and protocol. On top of all that, they need to keep systems and applications running as usual while simultaneously translating that transformation into business value.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Traditional IT teams are facing more changes than ever” hashtags=”IT, tech, cloud, business”]
Keeping on top of this fast-paced change is a big ask for IT teams. To gain a deep understanding of performance and health, a good starting point is to embrace a DevOps culture. Here, the siloes between the development and operations teams are dissolved, and instead, shared accountability and collaboration are encouraged. IT teams also need to be cognizant about investing in new technology and, at the same time, keep continuous service delivery working like clockwork. It’s therefore not a surprise that all of this must be driving them a little mad. However, instead of getting mad, they should embrace monitoring as a discipline, or MAAD.
Monitoring can be something of an afterthought for the IT team, and is often only considered when there’s a problem that needs solving. However, up down funk ain’t enough. Monitoring needs rigor and discipline to provide early-action warnings, optimize application performance, reduce cost, and improve security. Therefore, MAAD needs to become a core IT function.
Whether you’re an IT professional, a DevOps engineer, or an application developer, you can never be MAAD enough in this world of instant applications. When it comes to monitoring, it’s best to think of it within one of these eight key skills:
- Discovery – Let me see what’s going on
- Alerting – Tell me when something breaks or isn’t going well
- Remediation – Fix the problem
- Troubleshooting – Find the root cause
- Security – Govern and control the data, app, and stack planes
- Optimisation – Run more efficiently and effectively
- Automation – Scale it
- Reporting – Show and tell the management teams/business units
By gaining insights from these eight key skills of monitoring with discipline, systems administrators can better optimise resources, save their organisation money, and address performance issues, all before the end-user even notices any Quality-of-Service (QoS) issues.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Time to embrace a DevOps culture” url=”DevOps, tech, cloud”]
System administrators, without the benefit of a comprehensive monitoring tool that covers the above, are forced to go back and forth with multiple different software tools – often for both hardware and cloud-based applications in hybrid environments – to troubleshoot issues. The result is often finger-pointing and hours of downtime spent looking for a problem rather than fixing or even preventing it. In today’s hybrid landscape, organisations should invest in a tool that consolidates and correlates data to deliver more visibility across the data centre.
Therefore, my advice to IT professionals is to take ownership of the data centres. Whether on-premises or in the cloud, take control of the scale by setting up monitoring as a discipline, giving you the depth, breadth, and visibility you need to manage IT.
Let’s finish with some wise words and top tips from Adrian Cockcroft, VP of the AWSâ cloud infrastructure team, and a monitoring engineer who is always ahead of the tech curve:
- Align IT with the business
- Develop products faster
- Try not to get breached
All three of these can be solved by putting monitoring at the core of your enterprise IT infrastructure. It’s time to get MAAD and see what all the fuss is about.