Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When the value is obvious, most companies are willing to invest in tools to help employees get their job done better. But over the course of my career, I’ve noticed a few blind spots companies can’t seem to remember when writing out their tech team grocery list. These include things obvious to many, like training, antivirus for all devices, and comprehensive content management; or the more subtle ones like password managers or (yes) monitoring.

With the U.S. national security plan highlighting the need for both information dominance and protection, the Department of Defense is considering plans like modernizing military networks to ensure more effective communications between warfighters and allies in the harshest of environments and recruiting the specialized talent required for battlefield domination. To begin, the DoD must bridge the gap between its ambitious vision and the capabilities of current military networks.

IT typically leads the charge on selecting, implementing, and maintaining the organization’s IT Service Management (ITSM) platform of choice. Over time we see ITSM solutions become an integral resource to connect employees and IT.

Moving to the cloud is one of the most critical trends in digital transformation. Gartner even predicts that by 2022, 90% of companies will be using cloud services. As cloud adoption becomes more prevalent, let’s take a look at why the cloud pairs so well with IT service management (ITSM).

Let’s say you’re shopping in a retail store. You have everything on your shopping list except for one item. You’ve browsed through each of the aisles (twice), and you still can’t find what you’re looking for. What do you do? You’ll most likely go to the service desk. There, an associate can direct you to the aisle and shelf of where the item is. This is exactly how the IT service desk works for internal employees throughout an organization.

As networked environments continue to become larger, more global, and more distributed, many organizations have higher benchmarks for what they expect from their IT infrastructure. Companies want systems capable of adapting to hardware changes, support machine virtualization, and run applications across disparate data centers. But to ensure these complex IT environments are healthy, companies need infrastructure monitoring tools with visibility into key performance metrics.

The answer to troubleshooting network challenges lies in effectively monitoring your environment. But saying “let’s monitor our network” presumes you know what you should be looking for, how to find it, and how to get it without affecting the system you’re monitoring. You’re also expected to know where to store the values, what thresholds indicate a problem situation, and how to let people know about a problem in a timely fashion.

There’s a time-tested saying in IT: zero sensors, zero incidents. What goes unmeasured goes unmaintained, unmanaged, and ultimately unprotected. But measurement is no simple thing. What IT teams measure depends on who needs the info and what they need to do with it, so what should be measured? In almost all circumstances, results will have to be filtered, analyzed, and summarized in some fashion.

Whether you’re supporting remote teams or working in a hybrid environment, IT asset management (ITAM) is a critical practice to the business and your service management strategy. If you’ve been following our ITAM series and are delivering services to employees, you most likely have an understanding of the ITAM essentials and questions to keep in mind when developing a strategy. Now in this blog, I’ll guide you on the journey to take your strategy to the next level.