Chapter 2: Eliminating the Silos in IT Management

Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment Don Jones sponsored by Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment          Don Jones    Chapter 2: Eliminating the Silos in IT Management ............................................................................... 16  Too Many Tools Means Too Few Solutions ........................................................................................... 16  Domain‐Specific Tools Don’t Facilitate Cooperation ........................................................................ 19  The Cloud Question: Unifying On‐Premise and Off‐Premise Monitoring ................................ 21  . Missing Pieces .................................................................................................................................................... 23  Not All of IT Is a Problem: Ordering, Routing, and Providing Services ..................................... 27  Coming Up Next… ............................................................................................................................................. 28      i Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment          Don Jones    Copyright Statement © 2011 Realtime Publishers. All rights reserved. This site contains materials that have been created, developed, or commissioned by, and published with the permission of, Realtime Publishers (the “Materials”) and this site and any such Materials are protected by international copyright and trademark laws. 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If you have any questions about these terms, or if you would like information about licensing materials from Realtime Publishers, please contact us via e-mail at info@realtimepublishers.com.   ii Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment          Don Jones    Chapter 2: Eliminating the Silos in IT  Management  In the previous chapter, I proposed that one of the biggest problems in modern IT is the  fact that we manage our environment in technology‐specific silos: database administrators  are in charge of databases, Windows admins are in charge of their machines, VMware  admins run the virtualization infrastructure, and so forth. I’m not actually proposing that  we change that exact practice—having domain‐specific experts on the team is definitely a  benefit. However, having these domain‐specific experts each using their own unique,  domain‐specific tool definitely creates problems. In this chapter, we’ll explore some of  those problems, and see what we can do to solve them and create a more efficient, unified  IT environment.  Too Many Tools Means Too Few Solutions  “Comparing apples to oranges” is an apt phrase when it comes to how we manage  performance, troubleshooting, and other core processes in IT. Tell an Exchange Server  administrator that there’s a performance problem with the messaging system, and he’ll  likely jump right into Windows’ Performance Monitor, perhaps with a pre‐created counter  set that focuses on disk throughput, processor utilization, RPC request count, and so  forth—as shown in Figure 2.1.    Figure 2.1: Monitoring Exchange.    16 Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment          Don Jones    If the Exchange administrator can’t find anything wrong with the server, he might pass the  problem over to someone else. Perhaps it will be the Active Directory administrator  because Active Directory plays such a crucial role in Exchange’s operation and  performance. Out comes the Active Directory administrator’s favorite performance tool,  perhaps similar to the one shown in Figure 2.2. This is truly a domain‐specific tool, with  special displays and measurements that relate specifically to Active Directory.    Figure 2.2: Monitoring Active Directory.  If Active Directory looks fine, then the problem might be passed over to the network  infrastructure specialist. Out comes another tool, this one designed to look at the  performance of the organization’s routers (see Figure 2.3).    17 Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment          Don Jones      Figure 2.3: Monitoring router performance.  Combined, all of these tools have led these three specialists to the same decision:  Everything’s working fine. In spite of the fact that Exchange is clearly, from the users’ point  of view, not working fine, there’s no evidence that points to a problem.  Simply put, this is a “too many tools, too few answers” problem. In today’s complex IT  environments, performance—along with other characteristics like availability and  scalability—are the result of many components interacting with each other and working  together. You can’t manage IT by simply looking at one component; you have to look at  entire systems of interacting, interdependent components.  Our reliance on domain‐specific tools holds us back from finding the answers to our IT  problems. That reliance also holds us back when it comes time to grow the environment,  manage service level agreements (SLAs), and other core tasks. I’ve actually seen instances  where domain‐specific tools acted almost as blinders, preventing an expert who should  have been able to solve a problem, or at least identify it, from doing so as quickly as he or  she might have done.        18 Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment          Don Jones      Case Study  Heather is a database administrator for her organization. She’s responsible  for the entire database server, including the database software, the operating  system (OS), and the physical hardware.  One day she receives a ticket indicating that users are experiencing sharply  reduced performance from the application that uses her database. She whips  out her monitoring tools, and doesn’t see a problem. The server’s CPU is  idling along, disk throughput is well within norms, and memory consumption  is looking good. In fact, she notices that the amount of workload being sent to  the server is lower than she’s used to seeing. That makes her suspect the  network is having traffic jams, so she re‐assigns the ticket to the company’s  infrastructure team. That team quickly re‐assigns the ticket right back to her,  assuring her that the network is looking a bit congested, but it’s all traffic  coming from her server.  Heather looks again, and sees that the server’s network interface is humming  along with a bit more traffic than usual. Digging deeper, she finally realizes  that the server is experiencing a high level of CRC errors, and is thus having  to retransmit a huge number of packets. Clients experience this problem as a  general slowdown because it takes longer for undamaged packets to reach  their computers.  Heather’s focus on her specific domain expertise led her to “toss the problem  over the wall” to the infrastructure team, wasting time.