By Nicholas Brigman on January 20th, 2020
Started this article with the traditional “how to monitor and resolve business transactions”, then it occurred to me that this is known, what we really need is some resolve to monitor them all. It’s no secret that Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders struggle with uncoordinated monitoring dashboards that fail to work together in a synchronous manner. While it can be difficult to find a single platform that provides visibility across silos while presenting a user-friendly interface, the reality is it starts long before the dashboard and tools.
The complexities of business have increased immensely during our present digital age. Businesses rely upon hundreds if not thousands of internal applications to run and transact business, enact government policy, or manage the defense and security of its citizenry. Some of the new complexities are the interconnection of suppliers upstream (supply) and downstream (delivery) as well as governance components that can be mere reporting or are active affirming or blocking gates in a transaction. Not to be forgotten, are legacy systems that still participate in these processes.
Resolve means to set our mind determined to accomplish a task. How it applies to business transactions is to think ahead and when we are building, bake in security, bake in monitoring, build the logging into the code. Create a time ordered transaction breadcrumb trail that can feed diagnostic systems. Now this works great when we are building something new, but what can you do when you have a bunch of legacy stuff and everything needs to be “bolted on”.
Thankfully we live in the age of digital where there are many, many ways to do things, to resolve to monitor our business transactions. The down-side is when there are many ways, it is also easy to make a hot mess of disconnected information. Using a Connected Intelligence platform can help transform silos of visibility into coordinated, personalized panes-of-glass that act as a dynamic actionable single pane.
According to Gartner, the problem is that most monitoring dashboards fail to deliver a comprehensive viewpoint that adequately meets the objectives of different constituencies within the organization. Furthermore, many tools can be difficult to navigate and lack a common and easy-to-use interface. Business, IT and Security operations teams struggle with many monitoring systems due to information overload. The abundance of tools available can make it arduous for operations to provide timely data and support.
The most frequently cited challenges of operations include:
Automating manual workflows and tasks across heterogeneous systems and VDI systems has historically been difficult to accomplish within a single platform. Many data visualization tools claim a “single pane of glass”, yet many lack broad flexibility in synthesizing data sources from API, spreadsheets, legacy systems and feeds and baking in actions, data quality check, and guidance.
Getting started begins by condensing the silos of transaction information into a single tool that can be used to provide actionable real-time insights. In some cases, we have seen both APM (AppDynamics), RPA (Automation Anywhere), and Packet brokers (Gigamon) use their placement and visibility to create metatag or business transaction telemetry.
With the data, Business operations and IT operations can focus on illustrating business transactions while keeping each stakeholder’s experience in mind. While IT Dashboard frameworks must encompass elements such as network, cloud, system, and storage infrastructure into a single system, Enterprise Architecture done rightly focuses on the linkages from business, to process to app and data then infrastructure. What it does not always do well is address the experience. By applying people and roles to the architecture we can ask the right questions. What do you need to see? What is bad? what is good? When things are good or bad where do you look? Working together, business and IT can develop continuous real-time (near-time) feedback on health, performance, and uptime information about business transactions – how they impact infrastructure and how they drive business results.
Sources you will want to integrate into this new Connected Intelligence are:
Bringing the complex together and having it make sense is what Edge Technologies does every day, every week around the globe. By ourselves or through our system integrator partners that have expertise in selected industries, we can help you resolve to monitor business transactions. Please contact us for a demonstration of discussion.
We did mention a Gartner report which characterizes how to build an ideal performance monitoring dashboard, be sure to check it out for additional points of view.