Does your work involve a lot of ITOps monitoring?
If so, chances are you have developed a roadmap for 2021 that addresses digital business disruption, application and infrastructure changes and the ongoing global pandemic…
Here’s an opportunity to incorporate expert advice into your plan.
From renowned research firm Gartner, the "2021 Strategic Roadmap for IT Operations Monitoring" identifies IT monitoring aspects that must evolve and migration steps I&O leaders must take to stay relevant through 2025. In this blog, we'll show you some of the 2021 strategic roadmap's highlights. If you want to read the full report, you can download it for a limited time by clicking the link at the end of this post.
The Challenge Facing ITOps Monitoring
According to Gartner, "monitoring tools and practices enable I&O leaders to gain insight into the availability and performance of their systems, networks and applications, while also aiding in the root cause analysis of performance degradations. Monitoring tools are also expanding their predictive capabilities, such as the ability to predict bandwidth requirements or when disk availability will reach capacity." Gartner breaks down the tools that perform these functions in five major categories:
IT infrastructure monitoring (ITIM)
Network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD)
Application performance monitoring (APM)
Digital experience monitoring (DEM)
Artificial intelligence (AI) for ITOps (AIOps)
The challenge that Gartner describes with having multiple tools like these is that they're often used in isolation by siloed organizational structures. For example, Team A uses tool C, and Team B uses tool D. When an incident occurs, it takes a lot of time to align the teams and tools to get to the root cause. This forces I&O leaders to change how ITOps monitoring is done. Gartner further explains that "definitions of observability that stop at the infrastructure analysis are inadequate in ensuring digital business success. To deliver the digital experience necessary to remain competitive, enterprises must monitor top-down, go-beyond infrastructure and make their digital business observable." As a guideline for this change within ITOps monitoring, Gartner presents a Strategic Roadmap, of which we'll share a few highlights in the next section.
Gartner's 2021 Strategic Roadmap Highlights
Gartner's roadmap starts off describing IT Operations Monitoring's future state, followed by a detailed description of the current state. Between this future and current state lies a gap that needs to be bridged. Besides describing this gap, Gartner also presents a migration plan to cross it. While every bit of this roadmap is valuable, this blog highlights only one aspect of IT Operations Monitoring's future state: the unification of monitoring tools.
According to Gartner, “today's monitoring systems are bought to solve the needs of individual silos of ITOps focused around infrastructure, network, and applications. This silo-based procurement of monitoring solutions leads to long resolution times and tool sprawl.”
Unifying silos within ITOps monitoring is one of the core capabilities of StackState. According to Gartner, this can be accomplished by “continued investment in best-of-breed solutions, focus on integration between these systems and leveraging a consolidated dashboard framework that includes relevant data from each of the different toolsets.”
StackState delivers such a consolidated dashboard in the form of topology. Topologies in StackState are automatically updated by topology data coming from various sources. Topology data is sourced from different platforms that provision or deploy networks, virtual machines, containers, and services or are discovered via discovery agents. Each of these sources defines one or multiple subgraphs of the stack's topology. These topological subgraphs are automatically merged and mapped to StackState's stack by the script engine.
Closing of their “unification of monitoring tools” statement, Gartner recommends that “monitoring teams must become more aware of the changes in what they monitor, especially in an agile environment where new releases are being continuously deployed. To do this, monitoring tools will analyze performance within the context of a release. In this way, users can quickly ascertain the impact of a new release on performance and business objectives and compare results.”
Reaping the Benefits of Relationship-Based Observability Software
StackState provides your organization with a leading relationship-based observability solution that will save time and money in the incident management process. Get a holistic view of all your data to quickly identify the root cause of all incidents. Organizations also benefit from fewer outages and a reduction in costs and resources. Ready to change the way you monitor and manage IT incidents within your business? Sign up for a free guided demo today, and we'll show you first-hand how StackState can help.
This report is no longer available, but you can read other Gartner research we have made available.
