The science fiction author William Gibson wrote “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” And so it is with Cloud Management. There are leading-edge companies, that are doing amazing things with cloud computing, software defined networking and the delivery of applications. There are also companies that view virtualization in all its forms as a kind of needless complication, or misguidedly view it as one giant security hole. The same gap of experience exists in IT operations monitoring through Log Management and the likes of vCenter Log Insight. This gap between those who “get it” and those who “don’t” is the tyranny of the Bell Curve, the inviolability of the standard distribution.
Clearly not all technologies have the same speed of adoption. The Java® language took around 5 years to capture a decent chunk of the server application market. Virtualization has been around since IBM’s VM project in the 70’s and yet took off with the initial release of VMware Workstation, and then ESX/vSphere.
That said, it amazes me that many people are still being awakened to the usefulness of log management. It is a market that appeared in 2002, and has been growing ever since. Yet, up to 75% of IT organizations are not doing log management in any real sense. Just like virtualization, there are some companies that collect and process terabytes a day (of log files!), and there are those that still grep log files, or attempt to search in Microsoft Event Viewer.
But becoming proficient in any discipline in IT requires products, people, and process. No one product will solve your IT problems. You need the right people and the right process. This is a fact that is supported by many analysts . Gartner’s analysts have been talking about “Intelligent Business Operations” for a while now. It has usually been in the context of “Business Process Management”, which discusses how to improve an organization’s business effectiveness. And it is discussed as if it is something completely discrete from IT Operations Management. But it’s not. In fact, one can be viewed as a set of best practices of the other.
Consider for example, Jim Sinur’s paper “Use Intelligent Business Operations to Create Business Advantage” talks about the 4-step method for improving business decisions. They are:
- Observe – Take in information from the environment.
- Orient – Understand the information by putting it in context
- Decide – Determine several courses of action and pick the best one
- Act – Implement the course of action you chose.
This is known as the OODA cycle, and is meant for making “business decisions”. In fact, this applies to the data center as well, since information technology is so pervasive, that IT decisions usually *are* business decisions.
The first step above, “Observe”, is where Log Insight fits in. The first part of making any decision is to take in as much information as you can about the problem space. When it comes to IT trouble-shooting, the data you need to take in is log data, Without visibility into this data, a data center is essentially flying blind. Log Management is not new. Sophisticated companies are gaining a huge advantage through the visibility products like Log Insight afford them. These companies are operating at the leading edge of the unevenly distributed future, but its not that hard to catch up. A 60-day eval of Log Insight can help any organization get closer to the future. Give it a try today.
