Well of course there IS an "I" in Monitoring! Actually there are two of them. However this very simple concept is often forgotten and quite difficult to accomplish while effectively running IT Operations. I was reminded of this while attending the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Orlando last October.

Gartner analysts talked about the maturity model for running IT Operations as a Business, and they concluded that very few IT organizations had built the framework of People, Process and Technology to achieve a high level automation by welding the right set of tools together for internal IT departments to be able to deliver IT solutions like a service provider.

What's Happening Now
Typically, larger IT organizations run in silo-based organizational structures because of the very nature of technology subject matter expertise. The network engineering group, the database management team, the systems management teams with Unix and Windows, the IT security teams, the back-office application management teams and the e-mail/blackberry service delivery teams often run in separate subgroups.

Most often, these teams use their own independent tools (often from the manufacturer of the technologies they support) or a single narrow/deep tool to assist with performance and event management for databases, e-mail systems, servers or the network. This typical structure leads to 5-10 independent monitoring/management systems that often don't share information with each other.
More important, the lack of or oftentimes extreme expense and ongoing management associated with integrating multiple heterogeneous technologies and applications into a unified monitoring/management system leads to communication breakdowns and knowledge transfer gaps that prevent rapid issue resolution.

The Team Solution
So back to the title of this blog post: "There is no I in Monitoring." The idea is a play on the well-known saying "there is no I in Team." I could not find this commonly used phrase attributed to a specific person, but I have heard it in sports and business coaching as a consistent mantra for amazing results.

By definition, a "team" is collection of people working together towards a universal goal. Partly based on the mnemonic - Together Each Achieves More - which values the togetherness of individuals; this well-meaning adage emphasizes the need to leverage the strengths of individual subject matter experts to maximize the efficiency and success of the team.

So the crescendo moment you have all been waiting for. Valuing the individual strengths, skills and experiences of every one of these silo technology teams, and channeling them through a single tool and a single pane of glass will generate exceptional results in IT Operations Management.

We welcome you to our monitoring world and hope that you'll enjoy learning about our philosophies and the idea of a collaborative team effort in managing IT operations.

David Link is president and CEO of ScienceLogic (www.sciencelogic.com). He and his partners built a thriving company from the ground up by focusing on delivering "products that just work" to the underserved IT management marketplace.

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