Infrastructure and application data is required to provide the business with IT service assurance
Data doesn’t mean much if it isn’t put to proper use. High-tech leaders hoping to help their companies achieve the nirvana of business-IT alignment must learn where to find and how to best use infrastructure and application performance metrics to deliver true IT service assurance.
According to a recent IDG Research Services survey, 75% of U.S. organizations polled consider IT-business alignment a “primary concern.” Yet 35% of those organizations also report having difficulty tying business goals to IT. And 31% reported that they had insufficient monitoring and management capabilities, according to the report “The value of performance metrics in managing IT service,” developed by Network World Custom Solutions Group for CA Technologies.
Metrics is a quicker way of saying measurements. And in IT, performance metrics help network, system and application managers understand how the respective components they manage behave under various conditions. For instance, an application manager might want to better understand why end users experience a 5-second delay when selecting an online application, while systems managers might investigate why a server is responding slowly and the network team works to prove that it’s not the network causing the performance degradation.
To achieve IT service assurance more than response time metrics must be aggregated, correlated and basically translated so the business can understand how well IT is meeting its promised expectations, or service-level agreements. The challenge here comes in defining the relevant metrics to any business, application or IT environment. “Some CIOs surveyed recently say metrics can be as varied and ad hoc as the projects they’re tied to,” according to the report.
If metrics are defined, then IT organizations and business unit leaders can begin to baseline current performance of infrastructure and applications used to deliver IT services. Measuring the current performance will be the only way to truly note improvements if processes are updated, tools are added or technologies are tweaked. And that is still only part of the way toward truly creating an environment that can deliver IT service assurance.
“Without a rich set of real and comprehensive metrics, creating baselines relevant for each function within an organization can be a difficult task, and even then it’s only half the job,” the report reads. “The other half involves creating service models that map each relevant infrastructure component to the services, applications or transactions it supports.”
From there, business and IT stakeholders can build a dashboard to track the services most relevant to them and become alerted when pre-defined service levels are in danger of being missed. Various views can be created using the same data, therefore allowing IT managers and business units to view the data as it relates to them – without the data living separately inside the organization. Actually the data could reside in a configuration management system (CMS) or configuration management database, depending on which buzzword is preferred. This is where information about IT assets ranging from servers to databases to network devices live once discovered. And once the individual element is discovered, relationships can also be uncovered and added to the CMS or CMDB.
Establishing common end-user and transaction-oriented performance metrics will keep IT and the business equally informed on the environment and more able to maintain IT service assurance.
“A metrics-based approach also provides complete, up-to-date information that allows for better planning. That, in turn, leads to a greater ability to control costs and spend scarce funds wisely,” the report reads. “It also gives IT executives the ability to maximize staff resources, putting highly valued, costly resources to work on activities that directly align with business goals and impact.”
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