As one would expect, after having squeezed the last drop of overhead from the opex, Service Providers need to start looking at offering higher value and differentiated services to their customers in order to stay ahead. When life began as a VAR many years ago, the focus was on verticals and getting familiar with an industry. Today, with the transformation to a service provider offering varied benefits to the old customers, MSPs need to be able to monitor the custom applications and services within the industry. If you look beyond the email and web services, every one of your customers has a unique IT application or service that is the core of their business – whether its medical billing or an online gaming or streaming video application. Today, most MSPs monitor the IT infrastructure and databases for these custom applications, but few have extended the services for monitoring these custom applications.

Monitoring your customers ‘custom’ applications and services requires a higher value sale – not only does the MSP have to understand their customer’s business and applications that support this service, but they also will need to leverage their monitoring software’s APIs or custom monitoring abilities to monitor relevant metrics from these custom applications. Not only does this require a sales person who can explain the benefits of doing this to the customer, but also a technical person with some programming level skills to use the APIs.

The benefits are obvious – the end customer now has an MSP who can monitor their IT services which directly impacts their business bottom line, and the MSP now has a stronger relationship with the end customer because of the high value provided. Providing some of these service oriented performance metrics on a rich dashboard also raises the visibility of the MSP within the end customer’s senior managers – something they probably were not able to do if only monitoring devices and applications instead of IT Services.

We are already seeing this transition and demand for higher value amonst the MSPs as this industry moves further along the mature phase. Software technology vendors are beginning to adopt technologies such as ITIL BSM into their offerings, since these best practice technologies are essential in order to deliver the customized monitoring services to the end customers.

A large number of the MSPs had been using open source free tools before, and as they had grown in size and operations, realizing that there is a cost to “free” which can add up pretty quickly made them switch to commercial products which focused on ease of use and lower TCO. This was a first step towards higher efficiency in their NOC.

Interoperability between the different systems becomes an important requirement. Looking at the ITIL cheatsheet, at the very least you need monitoring, service desk, inventory and a billing system. Having an open API, and better still, existing connectors between these different systems so as to reduce the human interaction and automate as much as possible is an important factor. Even more useful, and often overlooked, is Workflow management – when a new customer is brought on board, where are the devices created, how do the monitoring and billing systems get provisioned, and how is notification escalated between the monitoring and ticketing systems.

Automation and intelligence within each system is next on the list – how can each of the systems (monitoring, service desk, inventory, billing) provide more efficiency within their own functional areas. In helpdesk systems, being able to prioritize alarms, auto-escalation, schedules, etc. are useful features. In monitoring platforms, being able to reduce the noise and false alarms means faster time to resolution with fewer resources.

While reducing opex has always been important to management, it seems to go through its phases. But the current vendor and analyst focus on automation and analytics is a good indication that using smarter tools to reduce opex is at the top of everyone’s priority again.

Vikas Aggarwal is CEO of Zyrion Inc.,
a leading provider of Cloud and Network Monitoring software for large enterprises and Managed Service Providers.

Reflecting on this a bit further, the answer might not be as simple as it seems. Is your Cloud provider really responsible for your application’s performance in their Cloud? Maybe its your network or Internet provider? Perhaps the DNS service provided by your friendly domain registrar is sloppy? Or could it be the slow CRM API provided by yet another SaaS provider that your application interfaces with? Current generation applications are distributed and multi-layered and the end services provided by these depends on an even more distributed set of applications.

Trying to create an SLA with so many inter-dependent components and so many providers is not trivial. Worse – there is no obligation today for the different providers to share any data on their IaaS or PaaS performance, even if this data is available to them internally.

While selecting a Cloud provider of any kind, you will need to start factoring in operational transparency and availability of their service performance metrics via APIs. The performance of their infrastructure is not as relevant as performance of the service they are providing – they might have redundancy and other design elements that might not impact their service even if their infrastructure fails, so getting their infrastructure performance metrics might not be relevant. You will also need a monitoring platform that has open API’s to aggregate the performance data from different Cloud providers and can give you a composite metric mapping into the performance of your service. And finally, your monitoring platform has to be able to provide a service oriented view of these performance metrics and not just traditional metrics like CPU and memory.

As more enterprises move to Cloud based services and infrastructure, their desire to work with a single vendor will force them to gravitate towards “cloud service aggregators” – a single vendor aggregating services from various cloud providers. However, enterprises will demand SLAs from the aggregate providers, and this will require some way to identify the responsible partner for failed SLAs or outages. There will be a need to get automated performance and SLA metrics from different downstream partners and correlate this data to provide aggregate SLAs for the enterprise. This requires transparency in operations, open APIs and uniform SLA measurements, and even though not prevalent today, this will become a necessity in the near future.

The administrative burden for managing this burgeoning infrastructure will only increase for IT departments, unless they adopt processes and software to automate most of the burden. To automate processes, you need to integrate the different workflows seamlessly, which requires the software products to have flexible APIs. The order entry, provisioning, monitoring & billing workflows are all candidates for integration and automation. There have been significant advances even within the cloud monitoring and management solutions to reduce the administrative burden with the use of templates, threshold baselining and creating of service models.

The other innovation has been in the field of data analytics. The IT customer’s demands have always been dynamic, and IT departments have reacted by provisioning for the peak demand, resulting in wasted idle compute resources. Even the usage of application resources is dynamic by the hour and day of week, and it is increasingly important for IT departments to understand the behavior pattern of their network and applications in addition to the computing resources. The number of users, the response times, the queued messages, the database query rate – all vary by time of day and understanding the usage pattern and deviations from it helps isolate the root cause of IT service performance degradation much faster, and ultimatately, higher customer satisfaction. More importantly, using APM behavior patterns greatly reduces the amount of false alarms for IT Operations, and lower TCO.

Automation and Analytics are smart product features focusing on reducing the administrative burden in todays distributed Cloud environments. Keeping business necessities in mind, these innovative features are pragmitacally relevant and a must for all IT departments in today’s business environment.

With the arrival and rapid adoption of Virtualization and Cloud infrastructure, reduction in costs for ‘incremental units’ of computing power, the ability to more easily flex up and down as needed, and the lack of restrictions imposed by the traditional models, are all key drivers to migrate applications to this distributed cloud infrastructure. However, with these benefits comes the added burden of high administration overhead from managing a virally sprawling & dynamic IT environment.

As the number of discrete virtual servers, components and resident applications explodes, performance monitoring and intelligent analytical needs to make rapid decisions will be critical for IT operations. Manually intensive legacy point monitoring tools will not be able to keep up in a dynamic and complex environment where applications can move in almost real time across the underlying IT infrastructure.

Of course, the better approach would be to utilize and adopt the APM “A” dimension – Automation in the monitoring platform to reduce the burden from routine administrative tasks for application monitoring. Implementing the right systems and processes and finding a monitoring solution which uses a good degree of automation is essential to gain back the efficiency lost from the increased complexity of distributed application infrastructure. Automation in the area of monitoring will ensure consistency in performance monitoring and benchmarking, enabling IT Operations to make better and proactive decisions for application performance. As JP Garbani at Forrester said recently, gaining the right level of productivity in IT operations will come from using better tools, and specifically, automation.

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Terms like “virtualization sprawl” have been coined to refer to the increase in the number of discrete virtual servers and related application components within the overall IT environment. This is no longer a hypothetical scenario, and organizations are already experiencing administration challenges because of the fundamental IT transformation driven by virtualization and cloud technologies. Consider the case of a leading educational institution in the Northeastern United States. Prior to embarking on an aggressive virtualization initiative, the operations team was responsible for ensuring the performance of approximately 1000 distinct physical servers. By the time the first phase of the server consolidation and virtualization initiative was completed, the team was tracking and managing the performance of over 7000 virtual servers!

As the number of discrete virtual servers, components and resident applications explodes, the performance monitoring and root-cause-analysis demands on IT administrators will multiply exponentially. Manually intensive legacy and point monitoring tools will not be able to keep up, and organizations will face significant challenges in detecting and resolving issues in a timely manner. In one recent case of an organization being overwhelmed, the IT team resorted to forced daily ‘proactive reboots’ of a large number of their servers. The team claimed that this workaround was the only way to keep the infrastructure performing, given the absence of a comprehensive monitoring and management solution to identify real issues and isolate problem sources. The IT team acknowledged that the organization’s users and business operations were being impacted by this daily reset cycle, but viewed this approach as the lesser evil compared to blind, reactive fire-fighting!

Off course, the better approach would be to take a more strategic stance and implement the right systems/processes to assure the performance of their IT infrastructure. Today’s cloud monitoring software solutions have to be capable of supporting automation of many of the routine administration tasks. More importantly, these systems need to have in-built intelligence to infer what his going on in the IT infrastructure and automate decision-making. The increased demands on the IT team will be partially offset by the automation capabilities of the monitoring solution, allowing IT personnel to focus on the deeper and more complex administration tasks. Furthermore, the overall efficiency and utilization of IT resources will be higher with the right capabilities in the IT monitoring software (see http://tiny.cc/cwytn to learn how).

One the first places to focus in on is reducing, and ideally eliminating, the time your team spends chasing down false alarms or false positives. Network monitoring software solutions that have smart notification engines that account for topological relationships (e.g. don’t generate an alarm for a downstream device if the upstream device is down), or apply intelligent rules to recognize short-duration flaps, are able to reduce the ‘noise’ and help reduce the time operations personnel spend responding to spurious events (to learn more see http://tiny.cc/vsiny). Additionally, Zyrion’s software for example, has time-based or adaptive thresholds that automatically learn and apply time-period specific warning or critical thresholds, which allows setting alarm triggers that match varying patterns of use or load in the IT infrastructure. For example, if nightly back-up jobs increase the utilization levels of a server during the evening hours, then you can set higher utilization threshold levels for this time period so that unnecessary alarms are not generated. The daytime thresholds can be set to be lower to ensure that a quality end-user experience is provided.

Enhanced administration features, such as being able to define and manage maintenance schedules, can help reduce alarm floods for ‘offlined’ devices. Scheduled maintenance functionality allows defining in advance any number of time periods for automatically suspending device tests at the start of the time-period, and then automatically resuming the tests at the end of the time-period. This simplifies the process of performing maintenance tasks on devices and applications, by halting alerts while the IT component is offline. Once a device is suspended, the data collection for all the tests on the device is suspended, and thus no alarms or notifications will be generated.

IT teams often spend a significant amount of time analyzing and isolating sources of problems. Here again, the right monitoring tools can have a significant beneficial effect. For example, being able to rapidly drill down from a high-level dashboard view, to the device and test detail, all the way to network flow graphs, all with a few mouse clicks, allows you to instantly identify the ‘top talkers’ on the network to pinpoint potential causes of problems. When analyzing alarms and events, the ability to quickly see related events (e.g. occurred at the same time, similar device type, etc.) in the monitoring console gives you indicators of linked or correlated problem areas.

IT, network and cloud monitoring software should be viewed as more than just performance assurance tools. They can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of your operations and administration team as well, and can enable you to do more with less in these challenging economic times.

This clearly has implications on your network and IT monitoring software, given that your management tools have to be capable of assuring the effective performance of your and your customer infrastructure as changes occur. There are a number of factors that need to be accounted for to ensure that your IT monitoring and management systems are able to keep up as your business grows and evolves. Most importantly, you need to make sure you minimize the resource costs and lead-times to keep pace.

To begin with, your monitoring software platform has to be agnostic to the type of performance data being gathered and analyzed, and have mechanisms to capture data from a variety of sources. Although the initial deployment may be focused on monitoring the health of a say set of Windows servers using WMI, a need may arise down the road to capture metrics from a security appliance via SNMP Traps, and at some point processing of system logs for a new custom application may become necessary. Common event management, notification, visualization, dashboard and analysis capabilities will also enable seamless inclusion of new IT components.

The monitoring software should provide intuitive UIs and workflows for quickly supporting additional components as the IT infrastructure expands. The ability to define and use templates, leverage pre-existing monitoring profiles, as well as clone current configurations, all shorten the process of dealing with expansion, whether in your infrastructure or that of managed services customers. Having the facility to centrally handle configurations and push these out, or restore them, further simplifies and streamlines your administration processes within a dynamic infrastructure.

Supporting flexible rules and thresholds for generation of events / alarms is becoming increasingly important. As business needs may vary going forward, the criteria, conditions and context for what should be considered a performance degradation warning versus a critical actionable event may change. A “one-size-fits-all” approach that was okay early on may no longer be tenable, especially if your customer base is expected to become more heterogeneous in terms of size, characteristics or geography.

Assuring the performance of IT infrastructure is a key element of delivering quality, reliable and value-rich managed services. Given that business change is inevitable, and the knock-on effects on the IT infrastructure are unavoidable, you need to make sure your IT and network monitoring software is ‘built for change’.

Although much of the current focus on the migration to IPv6 is around the nuts and bolts of making external facing services such as DNS work cleanly in a hybrid world, as well as the use of IP addresses to interconnect distributed server, storage and network elements, organizations need to also be thinking about internal controls, management systems and frameworks as part of the transition.

A critical part of transitioning to IPv6 technology involves ensuring that the right network monitoring software systems are in place to assure the performance of complex networks, data centers and cloud infrastructures. For MSPs that deliver services that may be tied to customer-owned or remote IT infrastructure, the preparation to deal with a hybrid IPv4 and IPv6 world has to be done much more proactively. In some cases, MSP services may extend back into managing enterprise data center components and applications, which could be using different IP versions. If the MSP is on the hook to deliver against agreed to SLAs or performance levels, then it needs to have clear visibility into the health and performance of the entire IT infrastructure that is part of its scope of coverage.

Your Strategy and Opportunity

It is time to start taking steps to trial and implement network and IT monitoring software systems that can seamlessly monitor IPv6 and IPv4 servers and network devices in a hybrid environment. Given that hybrid environments will coexist for a while, these monitoring solutions will enable organizations to uniformly discover and provision IPv6 devices, and collect and analyze performance data, all within one integrated system that supports IPv4 devices as well.

Users can ignore the intricacies of managing different types of devices, and are able to benefit from a unified management and operational view of their entire IT infrastructure. Being able to capture performance metrics from the full IT and cloud infrastructure, and then correlating the data and linking this to supported business services is critical to ensure the effective delivery of services and assure business operations in the new dynamic environment. These systems address this need by providing a service-oriented, end-to-end, performance view, whether IPv6 based or otherwise.

I recently asked a service provider where they were in their overall strategy for migrating to IPv6. Although they are waiting for customer demand to pick to make firm operational commitments, they have started testing a variety of internal IPv6 configurations, including the monitoring and management aspects. Although you may be taking tentative steps towards embracing IPv6 infrastructure, being prepared in advance by having the management tools in place will ease the process as you make the transition from an all IPv4 to a hybrid to a fully converted environment.

Although there are specialist solutions that support end-user experience monitoring, these tools are generally not pre-integrated with management tools that monitor the health of the underlying IT infrastructure. Having the linked ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ views and integrated capability within one IT monitoring system allows tracking service performance and user experience metrics, and then if problems are detected, the solutions facilitate drilling down to view and analyze the technical performance metrics for the various enabling components (e.g. CPU utilization of the application server).  This capability allows rapid and context-specific identification of potential causes of degradation of end-user experience. Having unified, correlated, status views allows the IT team to not only better assure the real-time user experience, but also conduct detailed analysis on areas of performance issues and bottlenecks in the underlying IT infrastructure.

Organizations that are in the midst of exploring new network monitoring software solutions can look for the following types of capabilities to get an integrated view of performance. Does the solution monitor metrics, such as response time, for complete multi-step end-user transactions? Ideally, any number of multi-step test transactions should be definable, where these tests can be monitored alongside the other device or server specific tests to generate alarms when thresholds are violated.  As part of scripting a transaction step, the user should be able to select specific frames and links for navigating through a particular path for testing purposes. Additionally, secure pages should be accessible by providing the relevant authentication credentials. As part of the scripting process, when the user clicks through to the next step, the software needs to be capable of performing basic validation to ensure that the transaction being scripted can indeed be executed without application access errors.

Combining transaction monitoring and infrastructure monitoring in one system, and then taking this one step further by mapping services to the relevant top-down and bottom-up metrics (see example of service monitoring solution at http://tiny.cc/mpqxn ), allows organizations to monitor service performance from both technical and end-user perspectives. As the overall IT infrastructure becomes more dynamic and complex with adoption of new technologies such as virtualization and cloud, the ability to unify and tie infrastructure monitoring with end-user experience monitoring will allow organizations to better assure overall business performance and customer satisfaction.