Unified IT Monitoring: Beautiful Dashboards vs. Deep Reporting - What’s More Important?

www.uptimesoftware.com

Beautiful Dashboards vs. Deep Reporting

What’s More Important?

UNIFIED IT MONITORING

Alex Bewley, CTO


What are we talking about today?

• Dashboards versus/and/or/maybe Reporting

• Dashboards: Real-time super-cool, lots of pretty colours. – Seen in Big Data, Cloud-based XaaS offerings (APM)

• Reports: Boring Excel and PDF, volumes of information. – Reminders of ‘The Office’

Well, what are you trying to solve? – Let’s break it down a bit


What kinds of dashboards are there?

• Data Oriented

• Informative/Summary

• KPI (Key Performance Indicators)

• BSM (Business Service Management)

What are you trying to achieve? – Are you learning anything?

– Are you saving yourself time or money?


What roles use dashboards?

• IT Operations – Developers (APM)

– Operations

• IT Manager

• Line of Business

• CXO

Who cares? – Well, the people who need them!


Who is consuming the dashboard?

• Gear the design to the consumer of it Need to be very careful what information is displayed

Make sure that it’s relevant for the audience

• Start thinking about key business metrics Mapping the IT world to the business world

Note: it’s not always easy (or possible)!

• An Application isn’t always an Application I say Tomato you say Tomahto

WebSphere or Exchange NOT an Application


Examples

• The evolution of the dashboard – Infrastructure to Business

www.uptimesoftware.com www.uptimesoftware.com

A Data Dashboard


Data Dashboards w/ Summary and Aggregate (Top 10) Information


A Topology Dashboard (for an Application)


Dashboard with KPI & BSM Information


Dashboards

• The Pros – Pretty (mostly)

– Salient snapshot of important data

– Great for non-technical users

• The Cons – Limited time frame

– Potential lack of context


Reports

• Why – Data over a long period of time (trend analysis)

• How are they used? – Capacity planning

– Cost management

– Distribution to end-user groups

– People who don’t have access to the monitoring system

• SaaS – Seems to be report free – why?

– Lots of SaaS products lack reporting in depth


Consumers of Reports

• They are the same as dashboards – BUT…. different goals

• Psychologically, reports are used differently – Reports get read

– You’ll remember to read it if it’s in your inbox, but you’ll generally forget to check a portal

– People like to play with data


Examples

• Forensics – So, what happened yesterday?

• Capacity Planning – Summaries to Line-of-Business Managers/Teams

– Serve a large community of users w/o access to up.time

• Summary Growth reports – Comparing large point-in-time differences (storage growth)

• Service Level Agreements – Better SLA planning with historical and “rear-view mirror” data

– Highly interdependent systems can cause application outages, even if outages are small





Getting the Best of Both Worlds

• How do you combine real-time dashboards with deep reporting?

• What’s out there?

• How should you evaluate a solution?

• How can you manage virtualized, hybrid cloud, or pure cloud environments?


What does up.time monitor?

Business Services

Applications

Virtualization

Servers

Network


Next steps…

• Set up a 1:1 custom demo – [email protected]

• Call us at: – 1.866.735.4304

• Download a trial of up.time: – www.uptimesoftware.com

mailto:[email protected]



http://www.uptimesoftware.com/


Map Dashboard Topology Dashboard Capacity Dashboard

Global Scan Resource Scan

Thanks!

[email protected]

@AlexBewley


Date post:	30-Nov-2014
Category:	Technology
Upload:	uptime-software
View:	4,678 times
Download:	0 times

Unified IT Monitoring: Beautiful Dashboards vs. Deep Reporting - What’s More Important?

Technology