Going beyond traditional monitoring...

The competitive pressures that keep business executives up at night are now also causing IT executives to lose sleep. After all, your team must ensure that critical business processes are working 24x7.

That means meeting service levels, ensuring a positive end-user experience, resolving problems quickly and managing change. At the same time, your IT team must remain focused on its own goals: to reduce costs, ensure compliance and manage consolidation strategies, and must keep abreast of new technologies and approaches.

A growing business can quickly push your IT management strategy to the limits. While some areas of your IT environment are performing well, others might not be. If you have no way to monitor end-to-end performance, you may not know about any problems until the business suffers. Then, finding the cause can be costly and time consuming.

Without a platform to monitor the performance of the entire environment, connecting the dots between IT components and the business processes they support is nearly impossible. To deliver quality IT services to the business, you need greater visibility into the relationship between these services and the underlying infrastructure. You need a solution that can help you align IT with the business and go beyond traditional monitoring.

IT teams provide a wealth of services across the organization, but often they struggle to deliver and guarantee services that support business needs. IT also struggles to measure the impact an incident or change might have on the business, because it is unable to define what services and components contribute to key business initiatives.

The solution that provides a flexible and integrated platform can connect business services with the IT services that support them, down to the underlying infrastructure services. Your IT team can then better understand the dependencies of each service tier and make advantageous changes to the business and to end users.

Managing end users, applications and databases in silos can be extremely efficient, but a downside exists. IT teams are left with a fractured view of the environment. They can monitor the health of their individual silos, but cannot effectively predict how a change might impact other infrastructure components or IT services within the environment. In addition, they cannot understand how end users are affected by performance issues, or work efficiently to find the root cause of a problem.

"With greater visibility into IT infrastructure, you can provide your organization with a single-pane-of-glass view into how it's performing, and more importantly, have a similar view into how business is serving prospects." said Tony Lteif, Chief Executive Officer of Security Matterz. The solution provides an integrated and correlated end-to-end view of applications and infrastructure components, breaking down silos to create a unified view of the managed environment. This view allows your IT team to prioritize incident and problem resolution based on end-user impact.

IT teams must work together to manage complex environments and ensure customer satisfaction. However, too often they must work with incompatible toolsets and processes that don't span production and development. Finding the root cause of complex or repeated problems can be time consuming and costly, leading to user abandonment and dissatisfaction. If IT cannot control changes in production, this might introduce unnecessary risk to key systems and impact service quality.

"With Foglight application management solution that provides proactive monitoring and real-time diagnostics from the end user to the database, you'd have a one-stop shop to see inside the state of the enterprise." said Talal Safar, Sales and Marketing Manager at Security Matterz. The solution that enables a seamless process from production to development, can improve the efficiency of problem detection, diagnosis and resolution across the related teams. Through a consistent set of tools that provide support for incident, problem and release management processes, it helps reduce mean time to resolution and helps your IT team audit and deploy production releases with greater control.

IT infrastructures must be dynamic and reusable as virtualization, SOA and IT governance gain ground. Yet traditional management systems often cannot dynamically adapt to change, forcing IT to employ time-consuming manual methods.

"You can be less reactive and see what problems are coming, and stay out of the fire-fighting mode, which can be expensive." said Bernard Baloukjy, Quest Division Manager at Security Matterz. The solution that adapts to the changing needs of the business can help IT to continuously and dynamically support key initiatives and new requirements with minimal manual effort. In addition, it adapts to your existing management solutions, both complementing these systems and integrating them to help your IT team unify all of the management data across the environment.

The Foglight solution provides the capabilities you need to manage the performance of applications and IT services now and as your IT environment changes. Through a combination of discovery-based modeling and a flexible architecture, it takes you beyond traditional monitoring to provide an adaptive management solution.

Most traditional monitoring tools give you a picture of the IT environment, but the rules, service level agreements, scripts and reports that form this picture are hard-coded and static. As the environment grows or changes, the monitoring operator must manually keep all of these requirements up to date. In addition, when new servers come online, or new services or applications are deployed, the monitoring operator must manually add them to all the existing management policies. A single human error during any of these processes can have far-reaching consequences.

It uses dynamically discovered dependency models to ensure an accurate, up-to-date picture of your IT environment. Your IT team can use out-of-the-box models as is or customize them to reflect their role-based views of IT. It also allows you to attach policies, views and reports to these models, for ultimate flexibility and personalization.

And, as new instances come online, they will automatically adopt the policies of their clusters, eliminating the need for annual administration and the potential for a management blind spot. With the right solution, your IT team can maintain an up-to-date view of the managed environment yet remain flexible and adaptive to change from a planned upgrade to new services provided to the business.

For more information on the next higher level of application management, database performance management, unattended monitoring, advanced analytics and automated tuning log on to: www.securitymatterz.com/foglight.asp