Let’s be honest, alert fatigue is a real thing and anyone telling you otherwise is flat out lying. If you have tools generating tens or thousands of daily alerts, eventually people will burn out and simply start ignoring alerts. Even if you have enough team members to divvy up alert reviews, the approach only works for a while. Trouble is, false positives are always generated when managing alerts, and people will eventually ignore false positives.
Three great things that do not always work great together. In the beginning there were large computer systems that few organizations could afford. Over time these systems became smaller and cheaper and many (if not most) organizations took advantage of them. Some just at the end-user level (i.e. the IBM PC on the desk), some only at the high-end level (i.e. a mainframe in the data center with terminals on desks), and some in a combination of both (anyone remember Reflection?).
Organizations struggle with getting the right visibility into their environments. Better visibility can improve performance, increase uptime (or decrease downtime, depending on your perspective) and ultimately improve customer satisfaction. Finding the right tool, however, can be a real challenge. Making matters even worse, vendors seem to be announcing new observability platforms every day.
AIOps is one of the current buzzwords (buzz-initialisms?) that is hot in the monitoring space. Everyone seems to be talking about it. How you have to have it, how much better it will make everything if only you just had it, etc. But how much of that is real and how much of that is wishful thinking? Let’s take a look and see if we can separate the buzz from the words.
When it comes to monitoring and specifically IT Operations Monitoring (ITOM), everyone is saying monitoring is dead – you need observability. Vendors are jumping on the observability bandwagon. There’s a lot of noise about observability, network observability, full-stack observability and every other kind of observability you can imagine. This is a topic we have touched on in the past.
Monitoring and visibility are dead. If you don’t have Full Stack Observability (FSO) you may as well just pack up and go home. Your business will fail, and you will be unemployed with no hope for the future. At least, that is what vendors currently pitching FSO would have you believe. But what is full-stack observability? Observability is the current buzzword in the monitoring industry, and full-stack observability is what vendors are currently focusing on.
Let’s imagine that you really need a car, and you head off to a car dealership to buy one for yourself. Let’s also assume this is your first car, and you don’t know much about cars. On getting to the dealership, you’ll need to choose which type of car you want. Now, you’re not very knowledgeable about the different drive mechanisms of a car, whether it’s a gasoline-powered or electric vehicle.
What’s your network doing right now? Where is traffic flowing to, and where’s it coming from? Are there bottlenecks you don’t know about? Where’s the next problem going to be? Network traffic pattern analysis answers these questions and more. It’s a way for you to examine how your clients use your networks. You may think you know how heavily your clients utilize each segment and VLAN and where the weak points are. But do you?
What kind of questions do you ask when you look at infrastructure monitoring tools? You probably start with some of the more important ones: All of the above are good questions and definitely should be asked. After all, if you acquire a solution that only monitors half of your network devices, has an incredibly complicated and difficult to use UI or doesn’t move you from reactive to proactive, the benefits are limited.
The cloud offers unparalleled flexibility. However, that flexibility comes at a cost. The amount of moving pieces increases. The environment becomes more heterogeneous. So, if you want to stay on top of things, you need a more comprehensive view of your cloud infrastructure. After all, you don’t want your customers to realize that something has gone awry before your people do. In this post, I’m going to talk about cloud monitoring.
