Author Profile - Scott Turkow has over 8 years of experience in the Enterprise Software space, primarily in Operations and Sales Ops roles. Scott was previously the Senior Operations Manager at Integrien Corporation, the leading intelligent systems management company that enables the predictable operation of mission critical applications. Prior to Integrien, Scott was with the Resource Management Software Group of EMC, which focused on the development and sale of automated network management products. A tri-athlete in training, Scott tries to be outdoors when he’s unshackled from his computer.
IT Efficiency’s Obit
Mr. IT Efficiency, who has left us at age 42, was a talented Manager of Data Center Operations; highly intelligent, articulate and possessed mastery skills in VoIP, ITIL, Open Source Tools, and CMDB. IT could have attained great professional heights, but his progress was stunted by severe bouts of data overload – ultimately causing his untimely passing. While doctors are still waiting on the results of the autopsy, they say the likely cause of death was “drowning in data.”
IT Efficiency was born on April 19th, 1966 in Schaumburg, IL, the son of two well-known industry powerhouses – 6 & Σ. After years of home schooling and then boarding school, which he hated, he moved to San Francisco to begin his professional studies to ultimately, in his own words, “streamline the world!”
Mr. Efficiency, while a journeyman most of his life, eventually landed a long-term position with a large bank and was responsible for the monitoring infrastructure used by banking services. IT initially made a name for himself by introducing Six Sigma (taught to him by his parents) and creating a culture of accountability and process discipline. However, even with process rigor, IT continuously faced significant availability and performance issues. His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing monitoring tools were installed throughout his organization. The very tools that were supposed to make IT more worthy of his namesake only worsened his condition.
IT Efficiency really took a beating when the bank experienced considerable transaction performance slowdowns in the online banking service and the company’s bottom line was affected by an outage that lasted almost 12 hours. During this particularly egregious problem, it was 30 minutes before IT’s team even knew about it - and the initial notification came from their customers, not from their monitoring tools. Staff suggested that the 3,000 alerts from 9 different sources in a 12 hour period made it difficult to identify and fix the problem, but IT Efficiency wasn’t about to change the processes that had helped him eke by for so many years.
In addition to these issues, Mr. Efficiency was under pressure to keep his budget flat while implementing several new initiatives, including server consolidation through virtualization. The biggest issue IT faced was a long-term employee - Manual Labor (Manny). Manny represented 75% of IT’s budget. Since Manny was of little help (echoes of “Manny being Manny” filled the halls), the intense effort required of IT’s team to identify and resolve problems was undermining the rollout of the new initiatives. Mr. Efficiency knew that he couldn’t increase the number of people in his organization to address the new initiatives, and his team was at their limit just keeping the lights on while the CIO was frustrated by recurring performance issues.
In the end, the combination of data overload and Manny’s constant presence rendered it impossible for IT to come up for air, eventually causing him to suffocate on the very infrastructure he helped build.
IT Efficiency is survived by his wife, Static Monitoring Thresholds; his daughter, Rules Scripting; and his two sons, Redundancy and End-to-End Dashboard (who never worked a day in his life).
Sad story, I know. The truly sad part is that IT’s death was avoidable. IT failed to see that he had established a process of collecting too much data – creating mass confusion and frustration on behalf of his team. In addition, not enough of the right data was collected – resulting unreliable or false alerts. And ultimately, not enough intelligence was applied to data gathering, filtering or correlation.
As stated by Mazda Marvasti, CTO of Integrien: "A typical enterprise environment has no shortage of data being collected from devices, applications, operating systems, etc. by multiple monitoring products. Each product has its own strengths in collecting specific metrics. More to the point, each product has an idiosyncratic impact on both your operational processes and your ability to ensure the availability and responsiveness of critical business services. Some tools collect lots of metrics on the theory that more data is better. Others use metrics to help diagnose an issue, but only after IT staff has been informed of the issue by the ticketing system. A few even analyze metrics to predict problems ahead. With an ever-shrinking IT budget and “do more with less” directives, IT operations professionals face a conundrum."
So how do you avoid Death by Data? A few thoughts to keep you Alive:
- Increase operational efficiency by transforming your existing monitoring data into actionable insights that drive a proactive approach to managing your mission critical applications.
- Start small. To begin, dig into one business service to determine the best ways to understand its normal behavior. Expand as operations groups get accustomed to dealing with future potentialities instead of past actualities.
- Focus only on the most important behaviors or metrics. Determine what behaviors drive your business and dig deep into those, rather than taking a “I don’t know what data is good, so I’ll collect it all” approach.
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