It’s natural to think of cost effectiveness as “less.” But in that “less” there’s in fact an opportunity to get more. Cost optimizing often leads to more innovation and more performance. Take this as proof: The current wave of digital transformation is resulting in unprecedented leaps in enterprise agility. So, what should come first? Performance or cost optimization? Don’t agonize over the chicken or the egg! Both ends are a good place to start. This article looks at the hidden powers of your IT monitoring solution as a cost-efficiency and performance generator.
Defining Cost Optimization
What is cost optimization exactly, and how does it apply to IT monitoring? Gartner defines cost optimization as “a business-focused, continuous discipline to drive spending and cost reduction, while maximizing business value.” Acnd that’s exactly what the best IT monitoring solutions should help you achieve.
The Pillars of a Cost Optimization Strategy
- Consolidation—Ditch compartmented toolboxes, removing any dead weight (overlapping, monolithic, expensive or obsolete tools). Cost-effective operations require unified and flexible platforms rather than disparate tools that don’t speak to each other or that won’t scale with future acquisitions.
- Awareness—Waste happens when no one is looking. Keeping constant visibility into how assets are used, when, and by whom is at the heart of constant optimization—and this would be impossible without robust, holistic IT monitoring.
- Usefulness—Remember that form follows function. Well-designed tools promote efficiency and engagement. They give back time to people who can concentrate on value-adding tasks. They transform complexity into simplicity and augment human capacity.
Cost optimization is not a touch once and move on type of activity. It’s certainly not something to leave for the day the budget gets cut. With the right data correlation capabilities and constant visibility on key indicators, constant cost optimization can become a goal in itself, elevating IT monitoring to a more purposeful role.
Is your monitoring strategy cost-effective?
Monitoring can play a leading role in an enterprise’s continuous cost-effectiveness efforts. But before you get there, you need to evaluate whether your current IT monitoring stands the test in terms of cost efficiency. Look at these seven rules for cost optimized IT monitoring to find out:
Your IT monitoring platform:
- Is open to the diversity of modern IT environments, displaying workflows from cloud to edge, including IoT.
- Promotes data uniformity and collaboration across IT and even some business stakeholders.
- Works in synergy with other ITIM tools.
- Interconnects with other ITOM or business platforms.
- Is centered on the experience of users.
- Measures SLAs and business KPIs.
- Is evolutive, scalable and pricing is predictable.
Don’t keep a solution that’s a rule breaker. Check out options that meet the needs of cost-efficient IT operations. But if your solution meets the above criteria, you have an ideal starting point for broader optimization efforts, from the back end up.
“With IT monitoring reporting and service mapping, we align IT monitoring to Business. Information is open-plan, transparency and communication are improved and the value proposition of IT is clearly perceived.” – Sébastien Noulot DataCenter Manager at the Pierre & Vacances—Center Parcs Group.
The ripple effect of a cost-effective IT monitoring strategy
An optimized IT monitoring strategy creates a ripple effect that will promote and sustain performance across the organization, effectively turning your monitoring platform into a cost-optimization tool.
- Monitoring tool consolidation saves on subscriptions and maintenance fees. It creates a common platform that fosters communication and collaboration across IT domains, resulting in faster problem solving, the sharing and testing of new ideas, propelling innovation and a culture of IT excellence.
- Automation of labor-intensive tasks, such as managing alerts and thresholds, updating the perimeter, discovering new IT assets, prepping or cleaning data for reporting, building and sharing dashboards, simplifies back-end processes, freeing-up talents that are much in demand in other value-adding areas of the IT organization.
- Mapping key business services enables more visibility into SLAs and real-time usage of resources, for the constant alignment on business needs. This translates into concrete savings on anything from cloud and container procurement to bandwidth and network equipment and utilities. It also expedites and enhance capacity planning accuracy. Bonus: IT’s contribution to the business is easier to communicate, which helps define budgets that are on par with expectations.
- It goes without saying that all the points above contribute to constant, reliable IT performance, a prerequisite for business performance. No matter where they are—working from home or from the headquarters, or from a remote North Pole outlet, employees need to access the services and apps that enable them to create value without delay, or the chain will be broken.
- Through dashboards that are reporting on real-time performance, IT and LOB managers can take a deeper dive into the customer experience the company offers and into the efficiency of customer journeys, working hand in hand to remove the frictions that stand in the way of sales, growth, and ultimately competitiveness and reputation.
Centreon can help you start such a ripple effect. Contact us today.
“We needed a common, centralized platform to monitor some 20 sites across three continents, in real time, in order to be able to gain the visibility and responsiveness needed to serve business users at the expected standards, but also to turn IT monitoring into a business-critical activity operated by a fully enabled, dedicated team of 150 users within the IT service.” – Guy Abondance IT Hosting Engineer at the Amer Sport Group (Europe and Asia).
How expensive is the status quo?
The cost of a new monitoring platform includes one-time or recurrent subscription costs, professional fees for its implementation, training, some maintenance and possibly new equipment for its deployment, like display screens, for example. Analysts believe these upfront investments can be mitigated by selecting open-source technologies based on subscription models.
Now, let’s look at the upfront costs of maintaining the status quo. In How to Optimize Your Investments in IT Monitoring Tools, Gartner notes that legacy point solutions are expensive to maintain with pricing models that can easily spin out of control while only providing partial monitoring, leaving out cloud or container environments, for example.
Then there are hidden costs to consider. Partial monitoring and inability to correlate infrastructure with business services mean a longer time to diagnosis and repair. From slowdowns to downtime to frustrating customer experiences and lost sales, the financial impacts are real.
Talk to us for a strategy that lets you evolve IT monitoring at a pace that matches your needs.
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