Realizing Benefits of Advanced IT Operations Monitoring

Co-authored by Prenaven Naidoo

In previous posts, we discussed how critical it is to ensure that the health of the IT landscape is managed well to ensure that business objectives are met in today’s digital world. We also referred to IT operations monitoring as a journey that needs long-term commitment and a transformational approach, going through different stages of maturity to reach the target state.

Going through such a transformation needs funding commitment, backed by a business case that clearly captures long-term, measurable benefits and returns to justify the associated investment.

In this post, let us look at some of the challenges organizations face without advanced IT monitoring and the benefits that can be unlocked by adopting advanced IT monitoring capabilities. The table below breaks down the issues and benefits across business, architecture, IT operations, and development.

Category	Challenges faced without advanced IT monitoring	Improvements expected with advanced IT monitoring	Benefit quantification and examples*
Business	Business applications and services suffer from availability or performance issues, leading to productivity loss for users	Users will face fewer instances of IT disruption and faster incident resolutions, leading to more time being spent on productive activities	Productive time lost by users due to IT-related issues: Expect saving 5 to 10 mins per incident*
	Disruption to business services creates a negative customer experience, results in brand erosion, and increases the risk of penalties due to breaches in SLAs or regulatory requirements	The more satisfying user experience of using IT-enabled services reduced the risk and occurrence of penalties and SLA breaches	Net Promoter Score Number of SLA breaches due to IT issues Value of penalties incurred due to IT issues
Enterprise Architecture	There are several tools with IT monitoring capabilities scattered across the business and IT landscape, but none that provides end-to-end visibility	Simplified architecture landscape by the consolidation of monitoring capabilities, leading to the reduced total cost of ownership	Number of independent monitoring tools in the IT landscape: Expect a 70% reduction* in the monitoring toolset footprint The cost spent for maintaining monitoring tools
IT Operations	Issues go unnoticed by the IT operations team till reported by internal or end customers	IT support engineers will be able to identify and mobilize incident response quickly	MTTI (Mean Time To identify): Typically reduced by 50-75%*
	Incidents long take time to resolve due to the complexity of pinpointing the issue	IT support engineers will see a reduced occurrence of incidents and will spend less time fixing incidents	Number of open incidents being raised: Typically, 30%-40% reduction* in incident calls MTTR (Mean Time To Resolve / Restore): Typically reduced by 45%-70%*
	Root cause analysis takes time and effort to identify and fix problems underlying recurring issues	IT support engineers will spend less time diagnosing and debugging problems	MTTR (Mean Time To Resolve) problems is reduced Reduced volume of incidents due to similar problem
	Attempts to identify and address underlying problems are not always successful, leading to loss of productive time in multiple cycles of triaging, debugging, and issue resolution	IT support engineers will find a greater degree of success identifying root causes and fixing the problem	Number of problems fixed Total number of outstanding problems
IT Development	Extended development cycle as developers spend time instrumenting their code for monitoring in the future	Faster time to release as developers will spend less time in instrumenting code for monitoring, and more time in enhancing functionality and performance of systems	Time spent in instrumenting code for monitoring: Expected reduction of 30%-40%*

* Example improvement metrics are based on Infosys’ experiences and published research. Such benefits can be expected over a 1-to-3-year period by successfully transforming the application landscape for improved visibility. The benefits will range depending on the maturity and scale of implementation. Further published material is available by Forrester Research as part of their Total Economic Impact studies that can help you understand cost savings, business benefits and ROI enabled by advanced IT monitoring capabilities.

While every organization will have its unique drivers and business case, the examples above provide compelling evidence to pursue advanced monitoring capabilities and unlock the associated benefits for your business.

In concluding our 3-part blog series, here are some critical takeaways for executives evaluating the monitoring capabilities of their organizations:

• Adopt best practices, and find the right technology partner that has a holistic approach and experience in enabling the desired capabilities.
• Use frameworks for developing monitoring capabilities, visualizations, and organizational maturity to ensure the comprehensiveness and scalability of your solution.
• Gain sponsorship and commitment by having a clear business case that articulates benefits and returns to justify the required investment.