In my last post, I discussed how IT operations analytics can transform the masses of IT performance data into insight that provides broad, cross-tier network and infrastructure visibility so that …
- Issues may be proactively recognized and resolved before they affect your business
- Future capacity and provisioning requirements may be anticipated
- A performance baseline built from multiple metrics can be established, reducing the time, money, and headaches associated with planning and deploying new projects, such as cloud deployments or virtualization.
But how should you go about choosing an IT operations analytics solutions? This is worth paying attention to, since such solutions are new, called by a number of different names (though likely not for long) and are available both as appliances and cloud-based services.
An IT operations analytics capability should offer …
Cross-boundary analytic tools that deliver a holistic view of your organization’s network and infrastructure — including data center and virtual infrastructure needs and performance — resulting in detailed, actionable information about all devices and revealing potential dependencies that can slow performance.
Network traffic analytics designed to help you maximize your network resources and better understand your network traffic patterns — without requiring additional hardware or configuration changes.
Look for an ITOA solution with network traffic analytics that allow you to monitor traffic within virtualized environments just like you would on your traditional network. You want an ITOA capability that enables your IT staff to understand what current types of traffic are on your network; this can aid in, among other things, planning service-level agreements (SLAs), anticipating congestion, assessing risks and creating efficient and effective WAN and cloud migration strategies.
Network traffic simulation that scans and thoroughly analyzes your entire IT infrastructure path (rather than merely testing results from a single simulation) to point out exactly where issues are occurring and provide potential solutions to those issues.
Unified communications analytics that provide detailed analysis of your UC device performance, CUCM dial plans, asset inventory and the ability to simulate VoIP and IP video traffic for UC implementations and migration activities.
Cloud traffic analytics that utilizes netflow and packet capture to gather network flow statistics to deliver meaningful data so you can plan, troubleshoot and migrate to an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment. This includes several key capabilities: analyzing traffic patterns, tagging traffic locations, visualizing server and application dependencies, modeling network loads and validating cloud performance.
Talk with a trusted technology advisor
Deploying IT operations analytics can save you untold hassle and improve your IT performance even as you migrate and upgrade, and ITOA capabilities are expanding fast. Talk to a trusted technology advisor about how your business can benefit.
