IT Operations professionals are now facing overwhelming amounts of infrastructure-related changes - such as hardware upgrades, OS patching, software upgrades, and server consolidations.
Based on the results of a recent survey conducted by Evolven, The IT Operations Analytics Report offers valuable insights into the challenges facing IT Operations, and how IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) can address these issues .
How Many of Your Incidents are Related to Changes?
With IT systems becoming more complex and more critical to keeping the business available, how are companies prepared to make sure performance does not suffer?
82% of IT professionals surveyed experienced at least one unplanned outage in the past 24 months due to changes that were difficult to investigate.
Between applications, environments, and individual instances, mistakes and unauthorized changes happen, demanding that IT Ops spend significant amounts of time managing configuration values.
The more complex the environment, the longer it takes to rectify or recover from downtime, with one of the first questions usually asked being “What changed?”
For many in IT Operations, as we saw from our survey, the answer to this question is difficult to reach, requiring detailed information. IT teams find themselves in a never-ending chase to keep up with the pace of change across the IT landscape. IT organizations are increasingly recognizing, as the survey results show, that a proactive approach to risk identification is more effective for outage prevention than playing catch-up.
What Tools are Key to Achieving IT Operations Excellence?
Today’s increasingly complex environments simply can’t be managed effectively through traditional processes. Likewise, information should not be siloed, and enterprise systems should not be disparate and disconnected. Looking to increase efficiency and minimize errors caused by change, IT organizations are looking to enhance their configuration management.
76% of IT professionals surveyed say tools that analyze IT configuration issues are the key to IT operations performance.
Configuration inconsistencies and unauthorized changes cause the most extreme challenges in IT. At the same time, the pressures faced by IT are only increasing. On one hand, IT teams are being asked to hold down spending, while expected to improve service quality.
Organizations have seen the following issues result from poor configuration management:
■ Increased reactive support issues and lower availability
■ Inability to determine user impact from changes
■ Increased time to resolve problems
■ Higher costs due to unused components
What Use Case Types Would You Find Most Valuable for Leveraging ITOA?
As companies face increased IT complexity, which is slowing progress and placing strain on IT staff, they are seeking to get the most value out of their day-to-day IT operations.
88% of IT professionals surveyed see the value of IT Operations Analytics as being applied to common IT Operations use cases.
The vast majority of the IT professionals surveyed consider IT analytics to be the best solution for addressing IT’s big data challenges.
IT Operations Analytics can be effectively applied to many common use cases in IT Operations, such as:
■ Change Management: Perform sanity checks to determine the probability of success before any change is executed.
■ Configuration Management: Detect discrepancies from desired configuration (drift) and reduce risk to environment stability.
■ Incident Management: Reduce incident response time and help eliminate incidents from occurring, transforming the investigation process by automatically analyzing all changes that occurred since the system worked fine, applying pattern and statistics based algorithms to identify an incident’s root-cause.
■ Problem Management: Reach root cause, or a probable cause, identification faster.
IT Operations Analytics Helps
IT Operations Analytics can end the chronic change and configuration challenges facing IT Operations today. The takeaway is that analytics are crucial to IT evolution and business success.
Sasha Gilenson is the Founder and CEO of Evolven Software.
The Latest
We're at a critical inflection point in the data landscape. In our recent survey of executive leaders in the data space — The State of Data Observability in 2024 — we found that while 92% of organizations now consider data reliability core to their strategy, most still struggle with fundamental visibility challenges ...
From the accelerating adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) to the ongoing challenges of cost optimization and security, these IT leaders are navigating a complex and rapidly evolving landscape. Here's what you should know about the top priorities shaping the year ahead ...
In the heat of the holiday online shopping rush, retailers face persistent challenges such as increased web traffic or cyber threats that can lead to high-impact outages. With profit margins under high pressure, retailers are prioritizing strategic investments to help drive business value while improving the customer experience ...
In a fast-paced industry where customer service is a priority, the opportunity to use AI to personalize products and services, revolutionize delivery channels, and effectively manage peaks in demand such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday are vast. By leveraging AI to streamline demand forecasting, optimize inventory, personalize customer interactions, and adjust pricing, retailers can have a better handle on these stress points, and deliver a seamless digital experience ...
Broad proliferation of cloud infrastructure combined with continued support for remote workers is driving increased complexity and visibility challenges for network operations teams, according to new research conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Broadcom ...
New research from ServiceNow and ThoughtLab reveals that less than 30% of banks feel their transformation efforts are meeting evolving customer digital needs. Additionally, 52% say they must revamp their strategy to counter competition from outside the sector. Adapting to these challenges isn't just about staying competitive — it's about staying in business ...
Leaders in the financial services sector are bullish on AI, with 95% of business and IT decision makers saying that AI is a top C-Suite priority, and 96% of respondents believing it provides their business a competitive advantage, according to Riverbed's Global AI and Digital Experience Survey ...
SLOs have long been a staple for DevOps teams to monitor the health of their applications and infrastructure ... Now, as digital trends have shifted, more and more teams are looking to adapt this model for the mobile environment. This, however, is not without its challenges ...
Modernizing IT infrastructure has become essential for organizations striving to remain competitive. This modernization extends beyond merely upgrading hardware or software; it involves strategically leveraging new technologies like AI and cloud computing to enhance operational efficiency, increase data accessibility, and improve the end-user experience ...
AI sure grew fast in popularity, but are AI apps any good? ... If companies are going to keep integrating AI applications into their tech stack at the rate they are, then they need to be aware of AI's limitations. More importantly, they need to evolve their testing regiment ...
