10 April 2015

Companies could save millions of pounds lost due to network downtime if they take a new approach to IT service performance, says a report commissioned by NetScout and conducted by Forrester Consulting.

Forrester says that the problem is that many organisations take what they describe as a “bottom-up approach to service management”, with 73 per cent of survey respondents having more than 10 monitoring tools at their disposal.

These include Network Performance Management (NPM), Application Performance Management (APM), and log data analytics to detect, alert, and help resolve performance and availability issues, says Forrester, adding that these tools are acquired in an ad hoc fashion to address problems that occurred in the past – 90 per cent of respondents agreed that their tools were purchased to prevent specific issues, not as the result of strategic planning.

“The outcome is a bottom-up approach to service management consisting of a multitude of silo-specific point tools and disparate data that lacks the ability to triage complex service delivery issues.”

What’s required instead, says Forrester, is the opposite. “Infrastructure and operations decision-makers see value in a top-down approach.

“An average of 93 per cent of survey respondents anticipate high or moderate levels of improvement across five service management metrics, such as time-to-issue-identification and time-to-issue-resolution, as a result of an end-to-end monitoring and analysis solution.

“This top-down service triage methodology relies on a consistent and cohesive set of data that provides a meaningful and contextual view of all interrelationships and dependencies across service delivery components,” says Forrester.

Forrester’s researchers interviewed 150 US enterprise infrastructure and operations decision-makers, and concludes with several key recommendations.

As well as taking a top-down approach, it also recommends companies do the following:
> Assess the cost of your firm’s service outages;
> Move beyond specialized APM, NPM, and log analysis solutions;
> Don’t jump into a global framework approach;
> Follow a simple, global, and effective top-down performance management approach;
> Get a holistic view of your application infrastructure through network traffic analysis; and
> Save time and money through metrics.