Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/207723
The recently released Gartner Hype Cycle report on IT Operations Management report explained why IT Operations Analytics expected to accelerate to mainstream, saying that "With a limited budget, access to IT operations analytics can facilitate making decisions quickly in a dynamic environment, thereby enabling more effective planning and better use of virtualization by leveraging cloud management platforms and DevOps." IT Operations Analytics can be a powerful addition to IT management tools, as Gartner Research VP, Will Cappelli observed in the recent report, Will IT Operations Analytics Platforms Replace APM Suites?, "IT operations teams should use IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) platforms to supplement and not replace investments in end-user experience monitoring, application topology discovery and modeling, user-defined transaction profiling, and deep-dive component monitoring." When IT Operations Analytics is applied to change and configuration management, using changes as a context base for analysis, IT Operations can turn piles of IT change and configuration data into actionable insights. Extract Meaningful Information with IT Operations Analytics Using mathematical algorithms and other innovations, IT Operations Analytics tools carry out calculations that churn through immense amounts of data, extracting meaningful information from a sea of raw data. The various emerging IT Operations Analytics solutions take a different perspective on this abundant information. Using monitoring agents to track changes to configurations, system and application components, IT Operations Analytics can parse log files to understand what changes were made and even who made them, enabling IT Operations staff to more quickly assess and pinpoint a problem. IT Operations staff can also use trending data to assess the risks of potential changes by comparing a change to historical analysis. IT Operations Analytics feeds data into its algorithms for producing business-relevant reporting and alerts. 24 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL IT Analytics tools can help IT Operations ensure control with: • Making data analysis actionable by applying statistical pattern discovery and recognition (SPDR). Assessing statistical clusters of application-stack usage and operations patterns to identify exceptions to or deviations from complex enterprise data center operations before they result in end-user experience issues. Textual pattern analytics sift through streams of textual data, such as logs, to find patterns that can be used to identify conditions and behaviors overlooked by more traditional numerical collection technologies. • Configuration analytics dynamically captures all change configuration information across IT environments, analyzing configurations to detect what has changed from when the system was working fine, verifying change consistency between environments, spotting discrepancies from desired configuration (drift), and identifying which of the changes can impact the environment or alternatively are a root cause of an investigated issue. Simplifying IT Operations To keep IT Operations running efficiently in support of the business, IT Operations Analytics is being applied to key data center use cases: Incident management. MTTR is woefully high in most organizations. IT Operations Analytics can dramatically reduce the time required to respond to incidents and even feed efforts to eliminate incidents from occurring in the first place. For instance, when an incident occurs today, IT Operations starts a race against time to sort through the sea of dispersed data in an attempt to figure out "what changed" from the last time the system was working fine, and what caused the incident. IT Operations Analytics transforms this process by applying pattern and statistics based algorithms to automatically analyze all changes that occurred since the system was working fine, identifying the incident rootcause before it can impact performance. Problem management. Very similar analytics technologies can help those involved in problem management to arrive at root cause, or a probable cause, identification. Change management. IT Operations Analytics technologies can perform sanity checks to determine the probability of success before any change is executed. Configuration management. IT Operations Analytics can detect discrepancies from desired configuration (drift) and reduce risk to environment stability. Reshaping Change and Configuration Management with IT Operations Analytics Today IT Operation Analytics are considered mainly within the context of APM and machine event management. One of the other critical operations areas that could be reshaped with IT Operations Analytics is change and configuration management. With widening adoption of Agile development processes, IT Operations faces hundreds of changes going into production on a daily basis for environments that can include thousands of different configuration parameters. When any of these parameters are mis-configured or omitted, operations can be impacted, quickly turning into a harmful incident possibly leading to an outage with lost opportunities that impact reputation, customers, financial performance, legal liabilities, and the overall organization. Enterprises should know that depending on the quality of their IT service revenue and profitability, in response to the painful and chronic change and configuration challenges that undermine today's IT Operations, enterprises can implement IT Operations Analytics to shorten incident response times, make releases seamless, and significantly reduce the number of incidents and downtime. n About the Author: Sasha Gilenson is CEO for Evolven Software, a provider of IT Operations Analytics. Prior to Evolven, Sasha spent 13 years at Mercury Interactive. He studied at the London Business School and has more than 15 years of experience in IT Operations. http://www. evolven.com www.datacenterjournal.com