NMS

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Today nearly every organization relies on some form of information technology. Companies of all sizes are increasingly dependent upon computer systems and networks to enable a wide range of critical business processes. It follows that companies are allocating increasing amounts of their overall budget to the IT department for hardware and software purchases, system maintenance, and IT personnel and training. With IT budgets becoming such a sizeable portion of overall corporate spending, it's crucial that business leaders base their IT spending decisions on comprehensive, meaningful systems' performance data.

IT administrators in many organizations now employ a network monitoring system (NMS) to gather detailed performance metrics from systems company-wide. It seems logical that while administrators use the NMS to monitor systems and network efficiency, executives use it to analyze performance trends and formulate better IT spending strategies. Yet this latter activity is occurring less frequently than it should: executives often lack access to NMS data or are unable to view it in a format that lends itself to analysis. Companies utilizing an NMS can harness its full potential by enabling optimal systems visibility that promotes informed, metrics-based IT investments.

Limited Insight for Business Decision Makers
Most organizations make financial decisions through an intense and thorough study of financial results, key performance indicators (KPIs), statistics, and industry trends. This kind of research and analysis is crucial to understanding where best to invest thousands or millions of corporate dollars. With the growing availability of NMS data, here are some reasons why many business leaders still make IT spending decisions based on technology trends, anecdotes, personal preferences, or "FUD" (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

Scarce Access to Performance Data
The data pertaining to IT operations is often not collected at all or is not made readily available to company executives. Many IT professionals use a variety of siloed (isolated) systems such as specialized database, network device, and application management software to control specific IT functions. Since these are not generally networked with the NMS, administrators rarely transfer the data captured within these systems to a centralized storage facility, therefore, business leaders never have an opportunity to view this information. Some monitoring systems lack a multi-tenant architecture, a feature that lets administrators filter the NMS by different views and determine who has access to each view. Without multi-tenancy, IT personnel may be hesitant to grant NMS access to executives who may unwittingly disrupt network operations. The result is that business decision makers rarely have the opportunity to view the NMS data - and its potential value as a decision-making tool is lost.

Lack of Comprehensible, Metrics-Based Data
Network monitoring systems are generally built for engineers rather than executives. The volumes of data collected by these systems - network performance statistics, database transaction statistics, and mean time to acknowledge, for example - may have meaning for IT personnel, but often are not distilled into a format conducive to higher-level trend analysis. Without metrics-based data presented in a comprehensible format, executives are unable to set clear goals or make informed spending decisions. They lack the visibility into their technology that would enable them to see how best to increase revenue - by upgrading hardware, for example, by investing in training, or by hiring more engineering headcount. As a result, the IT budget is often driven by those with more influence rather than by measurable statistics. Further, without measurable ROI, IT professionals cannot be held accountable for their spending and their commitments to the lines of business they support.

Failure to Connect IT Assets to Business Processes
Most IT organizations attempt to meet business goals through decisions that optimize their assets. This might include decisions to replace lower capacity servers or to funnel money into training instead of software. But these decisions are not always straightforward. Companies may be using their NMS performance data in a technical capacity, rather than for proactive system planning. In other words, they are failing to form the key connection within their NMS between company-wide IT assets and business processes. Many monitoring systems provide the ability to create business process views or the mapping of devices to business functions such as order entry, order management, or quality assurance. These views provide metrics that help managers track the success of their business initiatives and the effectiveness of their spending.

Data Views for Better Decision Making: Executive Dashboards
Most NMS software offers a user-friendly, high-level control panel - often known as an executive dashboard - displaying system metrics in a format that executives can easily monitor and analyze. IT personnel prepare the dashboard by categorizing each piece of company equipment and tying it to a specific business process. Business leaders can then use the dashboard to view assets in context and gauge the value of each asset according to the business process(es) with which it is associated. Dashboards help executives rapidly draw conclusions by answering questions such as:

• Are we meeting or missing our uptime goals?
• When systems go down, how long does it take us to fix the problem?
• When systems have outages or decreased performance, what is the root cause?
• How are different organizations or locations doing in comparison to one another?

NMS metrics help managers make informed decisions that guide money to the areas of greatest business impact. Executive dashboards also provide metrics that help managers track the success of their business initiatives and spending decisions. For example, suppose an organization sets a goal of reducing downtime to 50 minutes per year. The CIO believes that new hardware is the best plan, so he spends $1M to purchase and install the latest equipment. By July he sees, through the dashboard, that the company has already hit 40 minutes of downtime. Metrics show that system performance has deteriorated - indicating that the old equipment was actually more efficient than the new. Through NMS measurements, the CIO now knows he needs to reevaluate his IT spending strategy. In addition, strong analytics and reporting capabilities are essential to an efficient and effective NMS. Reports such as Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Uptime, and Mean Time to Resolve Issues enable executives to rank equipment by resource consumption; rank systems by amount of downtime and uptime; compare utilization statistics across various systems; perform forecasting or capacity planning by creating models with historic data; and meet compliance standards such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Sarbanes-Oxley. Managers who fail to utilize NMS report metrics may be unable to make fully informed decisions.

Linkage of IT Assets to Business Processes Through Categorization
Organizations typically use their NMS to examine the performance of each device on the network. They can significantly increase business value, however, by logically bundling these devices together and linking them to business processes. Systems, software, and networks can be placed into categories that link IT assets to the business systems they support, helping to clarify each asset's worth. Types of categorization might include:

• "Comparables" categories and subcategories: Companies can use an NMS to "slice and dice" their networks in order to compare and contrast performance in multiple areas. The opportunities for creating "comparables" categories are endless.
• Multiple subcategories with SLAs at all levels: An organization might establish its San Francisco category with subcategories of HR, ERP, and Web site. Within Web sites it might further subcategorize into databases, routing equipment, and servers. Within servers it could subcategorize into HP, Dell, and Solaris. Then the organization calculates SLAs at every level.

Once a company has categorized each device as part of a business process, managers can analyze how their network is performing over time across various locations, teams, and systems. This in turn leads to recognition of performance trends that encourage better business decisions.

Complex, Custom Monitoring
Many organizations' most valuable applications are custom developed, for example, OE or manufacturing systems tailored to specific business requirements. To enhance decision making, companies should select an NMS that uses methods to monitor and gather statistics on custom technologies.

Custom pollers enable the creation of scripts that test unique business processes or transactions. For example, to ensure the continuous availability, latency, and SLAs for its OE system, a company might create a custom script that places a test order every 10 minutes. Remote pollers on the other hand enable the IT manager to run custom pollers from remote locations and report data such as uptime, SLAs, and latency to the central NMS. Finally, custom data collectors/extensible agents address the need to collect business-specific data such as number of customers served or number and size of transactions. A company should ensure that its NMS has the ability to write simple scripts to collect custom business data and return it to the NMS for historic collection and graphing.

Benefits of Systemwide Visibility
The terms convergence and IP proliferation refer to an ever-growing array of equipment and systems that are being attached to networks. With devices like cash registers, HVAC systems, tractors, and casino slot machines going online with their own IP addresses, technology decisions are rapidly becoming more complex and important. To deliver optimum decision-making value, an organization must utilize the full capacity of its NMS - including detailed performance reporting and executive dashboards that link IT assets to business processes. With maximum visibility into how each network, system, and individual device is performing over time, business decision makers will achieve clarified business value for IT assets; shared understanding of IT resources; better prioritization of IT events; and proactive business growth.

No organization can hope to make wise technology decisions without adequate data, and that is why many of today's businesses are implementing NMS software. But it's not enough to use an NMS simply for troubleshooting or avoidance of downtime. Companies must optimize their NMS investment by giving executives maximum insight into how each system is performing over time. With the right education, the goal of each NMS should be to provide optimal, secure systems visibility that will help managers make informed technology spending decisions.