Evanios Solves Top Challenges Facing Modern IT Operations Managers

DevOps, Cloudification and Big Data – three leading technology disruptions that have transformed the role of IT Operations Management. Progressive technology enterprises are forced to follow accelerated application release cycles, leverage IT resources as a service and make the most out of the vast deluge of data at their disposal. This direction of transformation has forced organizations to integrate and adapt ITOM processes, and respond to unprecedented new IT requirements with agile and continuous IT operations. At the same time, IT Operations Managers (ITOMs) are struggling to keep pace owing to the following key challenges:

In the realms of IT Operations Management, cloudification is perceived as a challenge as much as an enabler. ITOM professionals often experience the disconnect between the IT and business goals that comes with rapid cloud adoption. When apps and services are delivered and consumed as virtualized logical resources that change dynamically, IT Operations Managers lose visibility and control into the underlying infrastructure. The ability to respond to incidents, manage configurations and provision resources degrades exponentially when operating a tightly integrated and complex multi-cloud environment. And when ITOMs fail to keep up with the accelerated pace of DevOps, software development teams follow the dark practice of Shadow IT and employ cloud solutions outside of formal enterprise IT approvals. A lack of visibility and control into Shadow IT services prevents organizations from maintaining consistent security within the corporate network. Ultimately for ITOMs, cloudification appears as a disruptive challenge instead of key business differentiation.

To support effective cloudification, IT Operations Managers rely on an array of commercial, packaged, open-source and in-house tool stacks to manage provisioning, capacity, performance and availability of IT resources. Eventually, the toolchain grows beyond measure and ITOMs fail to maintain adequate visibility and control across the exploding set of apps, network and cloud deployments. In some cases, the tools also comprise of solutions deployed outside of the officially supported stack. Each tool may work for a different and specific ITOM monitoring and management function – for apps, databases, network or others. This means a single version of holistic truth is never available. The cost, complexity, time and effort in handling and leveraging multiple tools makes most efforts toward centralized, automated and unified management ineffective.

A distributed, hybrid and multi-cloud architecture generates log data at each of the numerous nodes, layers and components. Every data source may generate critical information to help keep servers up and running at optimum performance levels. However, the log big data cosmos is inherently overwhelming and identifying the most important information patterns and metrics necessitates the right set of tooling, automation, centralized and unified information access. Manual analytics and workflows are rendered useless in extracting the insightful information hidden within log files. These insights include the subtle signs pointing toward security intrusions, for instance, that must be addressed before an infringement causes irreversible damages to the organization.

A recent Verizon research report, ‘2013 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR): Speed’ found that 66 percent of breaches remain undiscovered for months and that logs are a valuable information to identify these breaches. The problem for ITOMs lies in the technology limitations around monitoring, analysis and management of the wider IT network and apps performance, events and security, among others.

4. Manual vs Automation

In the absence of automated tooling that offers a single pane-of-glass view across the entire set of infrastructure resources, IT Operations Managers need to manually correlate reports from multiple tools and disparate sources to gain insights. The lack of holistic oversight, automated analytics and reporting capabilities means that ITOMs tend to overlook key information trends and fail to establish proactive Ops protocols. Fast moving DevOps teams rely on rapid resource provisioning, continuous operations and integrated management of all IT resources. With the growing management complexity of hybrid cloud networks, ITOMs struggle to gain granular oversight across the IT stack for various deployment requirements. In these circumstances, automation and visibility into the infrastructure resources and Ops processes can prove to be a vehicle for DevOps success, but remains elusive with the traditional ITOM tooling and practices.

The Evanios Solution

At the heart of all these challenges lies one key trend: the previous generation of ITOM tooling was never designed to address the concerns facing the modern IT Operations Manager.

Designed for next-gen ITOM practices and architectural requirements, Evanios ITOM solutions facilitate cloud-centric and DevOps driven infrastructure environments. The technology offers fully integrated, continuous and automated ITOM functions; consolidates and identifies information from the most impactful metrics; and portrays a clear performance picture of the wider, highly scalable infrastructure.

Evanios aligns event management, monitoring and IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) among other capabilities to offer a holistic, intuitive and functionally-rich single-pane of glass monitoring and management. The unified view and management control of the entire architecture empowers ITOMs to match the accelerated pace of DevOps environments.

The technology also offers automated event management, incident resolution and deployment monitoring. Combined with advanced machine learning capabilities to reduce noise, eliminate duplication and correlate events into the fewer, prioritized incidents, and predictive analysis, ITOMs can find trace root cause of incidents before it’s too late.

Evanios lets IT Operations Managers focus on innovation instead of merely keeping the lights on. And by the end of the day, Evanios customers experience rapid improvements in operational efficiency and realize truly agile IT-enabled business processes without worrying about cost, performance and security concerns surrounding their evolving IT environments.