Gartner recently detailed their new year’s predictions around IT Operations Management in a published research report entitled, “Predicts 2015: IT Operations Management”.
The four overarching call-outs in this report were:
- By 2018, controlled shadow IT will contribute up to 30% of IT operations activities, up from 15% in 2014.
- By 2017, 25% of I&O organizations will invest in discrete business value dashboard tools as the primary means of communicating to the business.
- By 2018, 50% of cost optimization and 30% of elasticity and agility IaaS projects will fail to reach cost, elasticity or agility reduction goals.
- By 2018, 20% of IT operations organizations will abandon legacy monitoring tools for new monitoring architectures, up from 2% today.
IT operations management (ITOM) has become a critical support system for businesses using IT for competitive advantage, and with increasingly complex application-infrastructure environments. In particular, the ability to efficiently monitor and manage a business’ IT services now requires new monitoring architectures that focus on an application perspective, rather than the previous infrastructure-centric focus.
Out with the Old, In with the New
We think the most interesting prediction made in Gartner’s report is the fourth bullet point listed above: “By 2018, 20% of IT operations organizations will abandon legacy monitoring tools for new monitoring architectures, up from 2% today.” If accurately predicted, by 2018, a whopping 10x more IT teams will be replacing their old legacy monitoring and event management systems for next-generation technologies. We already see a huge demand for Moogsoft products now, but a 10x uptick in demand over the next three years makes us sing until the cows come home!
At Moogsoft, we know that most monitoring tools in use today were created before applications and infrastructures became dynamic and increasingly complex. The rise of virtualization, the cloud, and mobile services is forcing the demand to new, data-driven monitoring tools that can scale these complex, software-defined environments. The bottom line is that IT teams must now abandon their previous legacy monitoring tools for new monitoring architecture
Looking Ahead with Incident.MOOG
Adopting new monitoring tools enable new ways for IT operational teams to detect incidents earlier and remediate them faster, so they can move quicker and keep up with the pace of change. The next-generation of tools starts with an application perspective, correlating faults with the underlying cloud or data center infrastructure, and helping Ops and Dev teams work together to restore application services faster.
Moogsoft’s flagship product, Incident.MOOG, for example, applies machine learning and social collaborative technologies to automatically detect incidents with applications and infrastructure across all technology silos, without relying on static rules that older legacy systems depend on. Making the switch to a next-generation monitoring architecture like Incident.MOOG will ultimately result in a more agile, collaborative IT environment that provides better business value and user experience.
Social IT – Another Piece of the Puzzle
The Gartner report also features a section that examines key predictions made from previous years that have proven to be accurate over time. An interesting prediction Gartner made in 2011 stated that, “I&O (Infrastructure and Operations) organizations in search of better ways to collaborate across technology silos would look to social media technologies to support I&O goals.” Gartner made this prediction during a time when just a few organizations were using social media tools to support IT operations. Shortly afterwards, however, more companies started using social media technologies to support IT functions. Use cases eventually emerged that showed enterprises leveraging social software tools for business continuity and major event management.
Since then, Gartner espoused that social ITM (IT Management) tools would eventually make up their own ITM market category, providing improved features and integrations among more traditional management products. Moogsoft was also featured in Gartner’s “Predicts 2015: IT Operations Management” report as, “A vendor that caters to the needs of organizations seeking a collaborative workspace to support I&O objectives.”
A Leading Example
At Moogsoft, we recognized early on the value that social collaborative technologies could bring to IT operational teams. Like most situations in life, communication is key when it comes to working efficiently in a team environment. With this in mind, social ITM tools, such as Incident.MOOG, provide IT professionals with the technology needed to create better collaboration across different technology silos. Notifying the right stakeholders and bringing the key players together in a virtual Situation Room has helped IT operational teams restore services faster, and detect service-affecting problems before customers are impacted.
The social collaborative technology behind Incident.MOOG creates better collaboration by providing IT teams with a virtual Situation Room. Incident.MOOG’s Situation Room brings the responsible stakeholders together to solve service-affecting issues in a social “Facebook-wall-like environment” designed especially for their purpose. This is how the Situation Room works:
When failures occur, Incident.MOOG notifies the right stakeholders and automatically creates a virtual war room – The Situation Room – for these professionals to collaborate in order to solve problems faster. Incident.MOOG’s Situation Room makes it easy for individuals to:
- Share diagnostics and knowledge
- Gain a better understanding of what other groups are doing
- Access pre-existing knowledge about the type of problem at hand.
This type of social collaborative cooperation is especially needed within a DevOps environment, providing a key element to the tools IT operational teams require in order to detect and solve complex-service failures in a timely manner.
Bridging the IT Gap in 2015
The Gartner ITOM predictions highlight the need for IT operational teams to adopt new monitoring approaches. Without the correct tools, IT teams will be unable to accommodate the complexities that IT service architectures will face in the future. 2015 will bring numerous changes to the new era of IT and software. IT Ops need to start by investing in new monitoring tools that also incorporate the social aspects of IT to ensure a collaborative, functioning, and agile IT environment.
