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Enterprises continue to invest heavily in solutions for tracking data more efficiently each year. In fact, Gartner has predicted that the use of AIOps and monitoring tools at large enterprises will increase from 5% in 2018 to nearly 30% by 2023.
While IT leaders are ready to transform their operations through monitoring and automation, many of these same organizations struggle to apply this data to drive improvements throughout the entire organization. With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at why telemetry and monitoring matter and how business leaders can use this data to fuel decision-making.
Many business leaders overlook telemetry as purely IT or engineering metrics, but they’re missing out on an opportunity to make improved financial and operational decisions. That’s because technology has been playing an increasingly vital role in business success, yet transparency into IT operations has traditionally been lacking.
Telemetry and monitoring—recording data and generating insights from it—has always been critical for IT departments. That’s why AIOps or using analytics and machine learning to identify and react to issues in real-time is a growing trend amongst enterprise organizations. While AIOps combined with cloud monitoring, network monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), and other solutions continue to improve IT operations, this real-time information can also have broader business uses.
With the right reporting tools, companies can transform vast amounts of data into valuable and timely insights that drive long-term business planning. Today’s business leaders, therefore, should see telemetry and monitoring solutions as an opportunity to bring together technology and business to make better decisions that positively impact the customer experience, ultimately leading to improvements in top and bottom lines.
Here are just a few ways business leaders can apply IT metrics to make better organization-wide decisions.
Telemetry can help organizations better understand the hardware they currently have and determine what they’ll need in the future as the business grows. That’s because maintaining enough capacity for on-premise infrastructure requires planning far in advance to efficiently and cost-effectively procure servers and other hardware.
A telemetry technique like simple network management protocol (SNMP) autodiscovery can scan an organization’s data center to detect and monitor a large number of devices. Using SNMP for network monitoring, companies can track their routers, switches, servers, and more without any manual effort. IT teams can use this information to better maintain on-premise infrastructure, and business leaders can establish a clear capital investment strategy for keeping business-critical applications running.
Monitoring cloud infrastructure can bring enormous cost savings to organizations that have the ability to analyze and act on relevant metrics. Robust cloud monitoring can help companies identify potential cost efficiencies by consolidating underutilized servers, reducing over-provisioned storage, and simplifying their cloud strategies to better leverage on-demand cloud capacity and services.
Telemetry for on-premise infrastructure can also lead to huge cost savings through server consolidation efforts. Understanding CPU utilization, network saturation, energy expenditure, and other metrics can help companies make the most of their existing capacity rather than procuring additional hardware.
Cost-efficient IT infrastructure— whether on-premise or in the cloud—also frees up resources that can be utilized for other digital initiatives. That means business leaders can shift their IT budgets towards delivering more growth and innovation that pushes the business forward.
Visibility into the organization’s network, applications, and other technologies can help business leaders identify and mitigate risks. In an era of always-on apps and services, the potential risk of downtime and the ability to respond to issues quickly is on the mind of most business leaders. That’s because downtime for customer-facing applications can damage a brand’s reputation and lead to substantial revenue losses.
While downtime can negatively impact customers, in many cases internal software outages can be devastating as well. For example, Office365 and email performance monitoring is crucial for ensuring employees can access their business applications and continue to do their job effectively. Organizations with advanced application monitoring can detect issues as they arise and take action to resolve them promptly without impacting business continuity.
Tagging metrics and triggering alerts when certain conditions are met can also ensure the right employees are notified throughout the organization. For example, if an externally-facing app has issues, then customer service representatives can be prepared to handle complaints. If there’s a data breach, however, compliance personnel can act quickly as well.
Businesses should leverage monitoring and telemetry, therefore, to minimize the risks of data breaches, downtime, loss of productivity, and other negative consequences of operating in the dark. IT transparency gives business leaders peace of mind that their business-critical applications and network infrastructure will remain available, or give insights into areas they can invest in to mitigate risks.
As you can see, IT teams are likely sitting on an enormous amount of data that can be used to drive organization-wide decisions. The key is strong monitoring and telemetry frameworks that can link IT data to financial and operational planning, as well as customer behavior. By breaking down data silos and centralizing key insights, advanced monitoring solutions can maximize the transparency and synergy between IT and business leadership. That way, organizations can implement a data-driven strategy for greater business success through IT improvements.
Is your organization struggling to make the most of your infrastructure investments? At RapDev.io, we help companies maximize their ROI using Datadog’s advanced monitoring platform. With the right tagging strategies, logging and monitoring implementations, and dashboard configurations, Datadog can ensure enterprises have visibility into their cloud and on-premise workloads across both engineering and business KPI’s.
If you’re interested in implementing Datadog reach out to us at chat@rapdev.io.
