Many business leaders are tempted to invest in top technologies to drive efficiencies, which can be costly, yet at the same time they are scrambling to cut costs and operationalize.
Little do they know that a cost-cutting opportunity could be lying right under their noses. A recent global survey of almost 1,900 engineers, managers, IT directors and C-suite executives revealed that teams are double-paying for monitoring, first with tools then with time — leaving employees stuck in monitoring cycles and strapped with fewer resources to focus on automation.
With an average of 16 monitoring tools — and up to 40 — teams are overwhelmed with more data than they have time to process, which results in substandard outcomes and a lot of wasted time and money.
Simplicity is key
Tool sprawl is one of the top frustrations highlighted by survey respondents. Instead of helping them scale, tools can land up requiring more time to manage. In fact, teams report that they spend twice as much time on monitoring than on any other task.
When it comes to availability, simplicity is an important success driver and organizations with fewer key performance indicators are more likely to meet their service level agreements. Simply put, efficient tools lead to faster incident detection and responses.
Perception vs reality
Teams say they spend nearly twice as much time on monitoring than on any other task, but leaders think their teams split their time evenly between tasks like incident response, development and cloud transformation.
When asked about DevOps adoption, less than 20% of respondents reported that their organization has fully adopted DevOps philosophies, practices and tools. Leaders, meanwhile, believe that teams have adopted advanced DevOps capabilities. The disconnect between leaders and teams can be bridged with metrics to align their perspectives and gain insights to drive improvement.
Some worrying findings of the state of availability survey are:
On average, two-thirds of the incident timeline is not actively tracked
45% of respondents say customers tell them about an incident before their tools do
Only 36% of respondents say more than half of their services are transferred to the cloud
Getting MaaD
Traditionally, monitoring was an afterthought — a resource that’s only tapped when there’s a problem that needs solving, but this is no longer the case, and it is being seen as a priority.
Monitoring as a Discipline (MaaD) helps IT professionals escape the short-term, reactive nature of administration often caused by insufficient monitoring. It gives you the ability to turn data points from various monitoring tools into more actionable insights, resulting in a proactive, early-action IT management style.
AppCentrix recently worked with FNB to implement MaaD at the organization.
“There are so many small considerations when it comes to MaaD, and it can become difficult to see the wood for the trees,” says Caryn Bell, Business Unit CIO at FNB South Africa. “AppCentrix helped us define strategies and methodologies and gave us a roadmap to follow on this journey towards AIOps, which was critical for a large organization like ours.”
What are the current practices in your engineering team? Are you clear on which teams, tools and key performance indicators (KPIs) are necessary for maintaining availability in your organization?
AppCentrix can work with you to develop a roadmap starting with a clear and cohesive mission, vision and objectives for installing MaaD. We then work with you to onboard technologies and ensure adequate coverage of every aspect of your IT estate. Comprehensive training strategies are part of the AppCentrix methodology and finally, the delivery of actionable insights for your specific organization.
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