The Big Buzz Around IT Operations Analytics

IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) Technology - The Next Big Thing

By 2017, the active use of IT Operations Analytics technology is estimated to grow upwards of 200%. Dubbed the Next Big Thing in IT, it is expected to integrate into mainstream IT operations in the next few years. Find out why.

From outages and performance challenges to well-publicized failures, IT operations must work extremely hard in the face of increasing data volume, variety and velocity, and system complexity. Traditional tech tools can extract huge amounts raw data, yet can fall short when it comes executing the time consuming task of gathering data from all the different technology and correlating it to get a complete view of what's happening across an entire IT environment.

Enter IT Operations Analytics or ITOA, solutions that are redefining how IT operations maintains performance, availability, security and compliance.

What is IT Operations Analytics?

IT Operations Analytics is an approach to managing IT operations that applies Big Data principles to help identify problems quickly. By automating the process of collecting, organizing and identifying patterns in service and application data, ITOA solutions free up IT teams so they can focus their efforts on solving problems, identifying issues proactively and optimizing application and system performance. Once the IT team can see the big picture, they can be more strategic in everything from making decisions about the best way to configure an environment and collaborate as a team to pinpointing the root cause of issues and fixing them fast, reducing
unnecessary spending.

How ITOA Can Help Your Business

Today’s digital economy requires the unprecedented use of technology in every department and division of an organization – an invaluable advantage that also creates a complex challenge for Operations and IT Infrastructure, with regard to collecting, organizing and analyzing the enormous amount of data generated. Data, of course, is the new currency that drives business decisions and actions of the modern world. It gets broken down from diverse and dynamic sources to acquire actionable information that can be used for meaningful discussions, decisions and actions.

Operations and IT Infrastructure can benefit from ITOA:

• By troubleshooting and predicting problems via analytics with existing IT Operations Management (ITOM) tools and resources;
• By optimizing IT service performance business decisions via one analytics platform that utilizes data from various systems through the business;
• By collecting and monitoring logs for abnormalities;
• By performing ad-hoc searches across the entire IT network for data using a single console;
• And by correlating logged data with service models, events or application groups.

As a result of these benefits, ITOM teams can:

1. Detect, diagnose, prioritize and resolve issues quickly and efficiently.
2. Save prior successful resolutions for quick resolution of common issues.
3. Gain a holistic view of the entire data center by integrating event management and data analytics.

Moving from Tools-Driven to Data-Driven Service Optimization

Using a single platform for ITOA works to transform real-time streaming data into meaningful and actionable insights that organizations can use to fuel fast business-aligned IT decisions. In order to fully optimize applications and services dependent on IT, the analytics platform must collect and analyze a myriad of data, including event, metric, user experience, log, customer service, social data and more. Big data analytics need to be applied in three sequential steps:

1. Data capture using real-time streaming, storage, indexing and transformation.
2. Analytics including automated baselines, pattern discovery, anomaly detection, statistics and recommendations.
3. Access and explore via visualizing, searching, correlating and comparing. This allows for trending, predicting and collaboration.

IT Operations Analytics allows any organization, regardless of industry, to make better informed, knowledgeable choices, pertaining not only to IT related decisions, but decisions that affect every aspect of a business. This allows organizations to quickly respond to problems, anticipate new ones, stay ahead of their competition and analyze data quicker and more efficiently than ever before.