Transforming one’s monitoring practices to meet the demands of customer experience and to achieve business goals is (very) much in style these days. But don’t get it wrong. This fundamental trend is prompting I&O to significantly transform the way they work. Here are the latest best practices in IT monitoring for the 2020s, making smart monitoring an essential part of the customer experience.
1. Trend watch: Aligning IT and business operations to stay connected to Line of Business expectations
A modern monitoring system promotes (and enhances) business performance excellence. In view of the major changes that IT is currently undergoing, a makeover is needed to reinvent the way in which the monitoring strategy is managed. And that means adapting IT operations to business goals. The current trend is having a holistic view of your IT system, as well as mapping critical services, revamping indicators and integrating data to measure the customer experience.
2. Three basics: Holistic view for Cloud to Edge performance
The message is clear: you can no longer monitor without having full visibility over IT infrastructures, from Cloud to Edge Computing. In concrete terms, you need to be able to monitor all devices, middleware and applications, from legacy to cloud, including Edge Computing. Then, you need to implement an evolving system to support dynamic environments. Can you imagine “revamped” indicators that do not integrate monitoring of SDN, clouds (AWS, Azure), Wi-Fi and IoT?
Keep in mind these three basics: 1) no blind spots, 2) an always up-to-date system and 3) an intuitive platform.
3. Total makeover: adopting new indicators for Cloud to Edge performance
Changing the way you consider monitoring requires completely revamping your indicators. Let’s look at the Cloud’s indicators: providing an innovative customer experience implies monitoring applications that interact with the customers. It’s not so much a question of viewing monitoring data from the Cloud, but rather pairing them with other indicators to have a holistic on the performance of workflows that are essential to the company and to the customer experience. These integrated indicators inform on real-time availability, and assist capacity planning, load-sharing management, and cost control. Integrated in dashboards and reports, these KPIs are key assets in helping you align IT operations with business goals.
“Even though the end customer does not see the different bricks of the IT system, every link in the application chain must be monitored through unified dashboards, including what is no longer physically in the company.” Loïc Fontaine, Monitoring expert, CEO at Lolokaï Conseil (France)
4. Exploration: Mapping the company’s critical services
In his Monitoring beyond 2020: Focus on performance study, Gartner refers to the ability to map critical IT services as one of the most crucial practices to implement. It’s up to you to model the IT services which are critical to the company (applications, middleware, infrastructure components and so on) by focusing your efforts on monitoring the performance of the 10 most critical IT services to have a view of uptime, service level availability and any relevant performance indicators to improve the customer experience.
“We have chosen to refocus monitoring on critical and essential elements of our IT system in order to be more efficient by only providing the information we really need.” Michael Benhamou, Technical Director at Pixagility (France and Canada)
5. Sharing is caring: Top-Down views dedicated to Lines of Business
Now that you’ve revamped your indicators , that your monitoring services are redefined, and your service map duly created, you’re ready for some helpful sharing of information with IT, Lines of Business and management, providing them with exactly the view they need on operations.. Dashboards and reports provide valuable information for the Lines of Business and enable I&O to make the right decisions and ensure the best experience for customers and users.
Consider adding a touch of contextual data to correlate non-IT but business relevant insights such as the number of shopping carts, client turnover, and even the weather report if this impacts business.
“We created and broadcast application availability dashboards. Managers have a real-time view of the availability of their applications. These dashboards use color codes or simple illustrations so they can be read by any user and are visible on large screens at the Group’s head office.” Thibaud M., Head of Operations & Infrastructure at the Parot Group (France)
6. Finishing touch: Thinking business when measuring customer experience (DEM)
Now it’s time to put the finishing touches to your new monitoring system and finalize your Smart Monitoring portfolio by monitoring the digital experience (Digital Experience Management or DEM). Once the data is collected, it is correlated in the monitoring platform and can be used to set up alerts, notifications, dashboards, cockpit views, reports and so on.
“We monitor networks, servers, databases, certifications and all our e-commerce sites, for which we particularly measure response times.” Guy Abondance, IT Hosting Engineer at the Amer Sport group (Europe and Asia)
This year and in the coming years, modern monitoring will be holistic and smart!
The critical place of IT in the business requires I&O to implement increasingly modern and future-ready monitoring, and above all accessible to all. This requires reviewing models, indicators, the very way we think about monitoring to switch from availability monitoring to Zero Default monitoring of the customer experience performance.
Download your ebook: “Customer experience, the new challenge of Smart Monitoring”. A 32 page ebook including nearly 15 testimonials from companies operating innovative IT monitoring, to understand the challenges, best practices, and perspectives of IT monitoring in support of the customer experience.
Share
