I have yet to meet with a customer who hasn’t asked within the first couple of minutes to explain the difference between Vantify and their usual Enterprise Monitoring solutions.
Here’s a simple method. Simply figure out which of the following your monitoring is providing answers to:
- Resource Availability. Any element within your IT infrastructure is simply a resource, available to work on delivering a service. Many old-school traditional monitoring solutions fall into this category. They ping a resource, wait for a response, and mark the resource as available.
- Resource Capability. Once resources are available, an additional technique is to check up on their current capability to perform the task that they are required to perform. This might entail running a synthetic transaction – for example, mimicking a user working on a website, or running a script to insert, modify, and delete a record in a database.
- Service Delivery. This technique evaluates the quality of the actual work being performed by the resource. For example, analyzing the speed at which a website serves each and every page and the number of errors, or monitoring the each and every request for a customer balance from a back-end system.
Most Operations Departments “make do” with Availability and Capability. Hence the reason why they produce reports like “We had 99% uptime last month” – and hence the reason why the rest of the Business looks on and slowly shake their collective heads and mutter “these guys don’t get it”….
If you’re in Business and rely on IT to delivery key Business Services to your customers, you need to monitor how well you are *actually* delivering your service.