We’re excited to announce that the definitive pulse of IT monitoring is back.The State of Monitoring 2017 Report is now available! In 2016, we launched the report to shine a light on the ever-changing and diverse landscape of IT monitoring. We wanted to explore how IT practitioners are tackling the challenges and opportunities posed by the increasing agility and complexity of IT applications and infrastructure.

Is your team ready for 2017? Featuring early release findings from BigPanda’s forthcoming State of Monitoring Report, our latest e-book takes a look at how key industry trends will affect IT operations in the upcoming year.

The responses are in, the data has been crunched, and now we’re ready to share the results. I’m excited to announce that BigPanda’s first-ever State of Monitoring Report is now available for download!

If you work in tech, you’ve probably heard of the Pareto principle, or, as it’s more commonly called, the 80/20 rule. According to the 80/20 rule, for many events, 80 percent of the results are generated by 20 percent of the inputs.

A little background: back in the late 1800s the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed that approximately 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. Not long after, Pareto also observed that 20 percent of the peapods in his garden generated 80 of the crop’s yield – and thus the 80/20 principle was born. 

We’re proud to be unveiling a new concept we pioneered in the den that finally moves beyond dashboards as eye candy to a new place where IT analytics can be used to make better ops decisions. It’s called Service Health Analytics and it exposes all data from all monitoring sources in the form of configurable dashboards that can be customized, saved, and shared.

What is MTTR? Don’t answer with what it stands for or how you use it. The question is more philosophical than literal. For too long we’ve measured operational performance based on the number of minutes it takes to resolve an incident. The almighty trend line slopes down then we gulp milk from the jug of IT inflated ego like NASCAR drivers drunk on Nagios exhaust fumes.

Like the Zen riddle about one hand clapping it’s important to first ask:

1. What’s an incident?
2. What does it mean to resolve one? …and (the ever-blasphemous)
3. Is it unequivocally better to resolve them quickly?

My answers...

Enterprise application and computing environments have changed radically over the past fifteen years. Anyone who has spent even a day in an IT role can tell you that.What gets less attention, however, is how those changes undermine the ability of operations teams to do their jobs. The problem is that as computing and application environments have changed dramatically, workflows and org charts have not.

We engineers love measuring stuff. Whether it helps us solve an immediate problem, gets us ready for a bad day or just because most of us are information junkies, we love keeping track of metrics. The spectrum of what can be measured is very wide. It can include data from every part of our system: from technical metrics such as disk space or RPM, through UI metrics like page load times, to business KPIs such as revenue, conversion rates and so on. When choosing which metrics to collect, we usually start with the obvious ones: those that reflect the current state of the system (e.g., CPU, memory and load). There are quite a few articles and blog posts about these metrics, so I’m not going to discuss that here. Rather, I would like to focus on metrics that reflect the user experience.

Here are the four metrics that we at BigPanda see as the most important in this category: