You know the drill: It’s a brand-new year, and you’ve got to make some resolutions. OK, you might not keep them all, like that time you said you’d cut down on Nutella. New year resolutions generally are a good tool to set you up for success, for the year that comes and beyond. This blog post provides some inspiration in setting up your own ITOps new year’s resolutions, with the higher objective to turn your IT monitoring platform into an essential lever of digital business success.
“What the new year brings to you will depend a great deal on what you bring to the new year.” ― Vern McLellan
#1 Be planet-wise—Committing to Green IT
We all paid close attention to COP26 last November. If you feel your organization could do better in terms of lowering IT’s environmental footprint, green IT, a.k.a. “responsible digital” or “sustainable ICT,” can be an impactful resolution for 2022. Let’s recall that green IT is defined as “all information and communication technologies whose economic, ecological, social and societal footprint has been voluntarily reduced and/or which help humanity to achieve the objectives of sustainable development.” (source greenit.fr). The global pandemic amplified our reliance on IT, and thus our awareness of our industry’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Greener IT practices as they can be enabled by IT monitoring therefore tops our New Year’s resolution list for 2022.
How is Centreon helping you commit to sustainable IT
Both directly and indirectly, Centreon aligns to the principles of your green IT strategy. Directly, you can leverage the capabilities of your Centreon monitoring solution to measure and track carbon and CSR targets through:
- Extending the scope of your monitoring to connected objects, for example.
- Deploying probes to measure equipment energy consumption.
- Correlating data to calculate a carbon index or a GHG balance sheet.
Indirectly, through our own commitment to sustainable practices, such as
- Favoring ecofriendly solutions and low carbon impact configurations (high repairability, reduced energy consumption, etc.).
- Adapting digital behaviors, such as limiting the emails we send or store, for example, and turning off servers when they are not in use.
- Contributing to broader sustainable initiatives in our workplaces, such as reducing plastic use, telecommuting, public transportation or carpool incentives, etc.
#2 Broaden horizons: Sharing KPIs with business stakeholders
Traveling is the best way to learn, my grandmother used to say. In this case, through the magic of business-aware IT monitoring, it’s the data that travels for you (helping you keep your #1 resolution on GES) to have enriching conversations with your business colleagues. IT monitoring is the new lingua franca that enables business observability (more on this at resolution #5), building a much-needed bridge between IT and business. According to the State of IT Monitoring survey, 90% of IT operations professionals believe IT needs to provide business oriented KPIs. So, if you’re not yet providing such business oriented KPIs yet, 2022 is the year to do so considering IT and business interdependence growing even more in the next few months.
How is Centreon helping you open new business horizons
It starts with a conversation (and maybe with the conversion of some of your business colleagues). Together, you can define which KPIs could be delivered to whom and for which purpose.
- Identify and model critical business services for which your colleagues could benefit from receiving regular updates on their health status; (an issue with an email server or with other key infrastructure supporting the ERP for example, can impact business sales.)
- Make sure indicators are meaningful and visual. Your business colleagues may not engage if they don’t get the meaning of what they see.
- Find creative ways to display relevant info—monitoring-generated indicators can travel beyond the mailbox, think strategically positioned screens (in elevators, cafeteria, office lobby), your company’s intranet, etc.
#3 Keep tool sprawl in check: A unified IT monitoring platform for improved collaboration
The dawn of a new year is perfect to streamline your surroundings—whether the tool shed, the garage or any other source of clutter, including your monitoring toolbox. Organizations use on average 14 different monitoring tools (Source: State of IT monitoring, Centreon). In the next year, your IT environment is likely to become even more complex and you can’t afford your tools letting you down. Streamlining your monitoring platform is a resolution that will make you more efficient in 2022.
How is Centreon helping you streamline your monitoring platform
To speak to the benefits of a streamlined monitoring toolbox, there are no better words than those of our clients who have unified their monitoring platform in years past.
- A large French metropolitan area, Clermont Auvergne Métropole leverages a centralized IT monitoring platform and a common IT operation team to sustain operational capacity for their 1,500 agents and ensure optimal public service delivery to users.
- At the French Department of Justice, ITOps use a centralized and shared monitoring platform. The IT team notes that:
“Since we adopted Centreon, all teams share the same IT monitoring solution and work practices. This has enabled us to monitor 90% of the Justice Department’s IT system—helping improve availability. As well, as part of our organization’s agile transformation, the new monitoring solution contributed to breaking silos and strengthening communications. Synergy and efficiency within our teams have also improved.”
Once a centralized and shared IT monitoring platform is in place you can go further, adopting resolution #4 to seamlessly collect a diversity of data in your Centreon monitoring platform.
#4 Build bridges: Connecting IT monitoring with other ITOps tools
In 2021 you’ve probably made some progress in breaking down the silos between the various functions within your larger IT family—and beyond. In 2022, your monitoring solution pushes you further in the direction of integration. As accomplished in resolution #3, you can now interconnect your centralized and streamlined IT monitoring platform with a range of ITSM, APM, DEM, as well as automation and AIOps tools. In 2022, connected monitoring is part of your strategies to improve collaboration between IT and business stakeholders, expedite the discovery and configuration of a diversity of new IT assets, shorten issue resolution times, optimize resources, and contribute to the pool of data that will tell you how to make the business faster and smarter.
How is Centreon helping you interconnect with other ITOps tools
One chief way Centreon helps you build bridges across IT roles and tools is through connectors—and we keep building new ones. If not done already, we suggest you start on your journey towards connected monitoring by… connecting to The Watch, our new community space where you can get the latest news plus some knowledgeable help when you need it. Then be on your way to connected monitoring leveraging these tools:
- Monitoring packages and templates tailored to your needs for blockchain, cloud, and container monitoring; interconnecting with other tools in your stack such as ITSM, DEM, APM and NPM solutions and ITOPs tools like PagerDuty or Splunk,
- Auto-discovery engine to swiftly discover new assets.
- Stream connectors, which, through APIs, let you transmit monitoring data to IT automation (ex. Ansible or Puppet), AIOps (ex. Elastic or Splunk) and ITSM tools (ex. Service Now).
#5 Adopt new perspectives: Enabling business observability
43% of ITOps professionals say that extending IT Monitoring from technical KPIs to business-oriented KPIs is a priority in their organizations. —Source: Preparing for the Future of IT Monitoring.
The data point above highlights the importance of enabling business observability in 2022. Beyond being a popular buzzword in recent months, observability is how your organization can answer the question: “Is IT being delivered optimally for the business to perform?” Let’s recall that observability is a process that combines IT monitoring with other tools to provide visibility into digital business applications, so that organizations can constantly innovate and improve customer experiences. Gartner recommends that I&O leaders use observability to extend current monitoring capabilities, processes, and culture to deliver these benefits. In short, IT monitoring is a cornerstone of an organization’s observability stack.
How is Centreon helping you with business observability
The first step is to recognize that enabling observability in your organization is not the matter of a single tool but about building an observability stack that collects, analyzes, and delivers the data and insights digital businesses need to perform. Follow these 5 principles to start building your observability stack.
- Leverage automation to seamlessly integrate monitoring into your IT operations,
- Map business-critical IT services, as business observability requires a deep understanding of how global workflows are going—on top of understanding how specific services are performing.
- Engage all digital business stakeholders, make sure you understand their needs in terms of KPIs. Provide IT and business managers with views on IT performance that is tailored to their needs.
- Make Centreon a key part of your stack (see resolution #4) so IT monitoring data gets a longer shelf life, helping to understand the global health of the digital business.
- Create a virtuous loop for a stronger business using Centreon’s ability to correlate data to provide the necessary context to inform decision-making.
Many look forward to the new year for a fresh start but take along old habits for the ride. We hope these resolutions are the new habits that will set you up for successfully meeting the challenges 2022 holds for your digital organization.
Cheers!
Share
