We’ve all been there – a customer calls in and says that they can’t access their account or other service. You look at your sixteen dashboards and they all show “green”. You immediately sound the alarm and a two-hour call commences with a cast of dozens. Then, every team states that there is no problem with their piece of the application or infrastructure. Therein lies the problem – each team has its own tool and is reporting a different picture.

Siloed processes and tools are making it more difficult for businesses to identify and address issues with their critical applications. Why is this approach still opted for, when a single interface application can result in savings on two of the enterprise’s most precious commodities – time and money.

How a two-hour call can turn into a cascade of dozens when an alert strikes.

What’s the cost?

How many people were involved in this problem from start to finish? 10? 20? 50? How long did it take to resolve the problem? Two hours? Five hours? How much do you pay these department managers, technical specialists and experts?

An hour of lost business caused by a critical application will mean different things to each different enterprise. What happens if insurance companies can’t process policies for an hour? Or a bank ATM network can’t accept deposits, payments or even dispense cash? These numbers are usually staggering.

The times they have a-changed

Why can’t our 16 tools alert us to every possible problem? Well, mainly because there are 16 different tools, each looking at their separate portion of the infrastructure or application. Your monitoring teams, processes and tools were likely put in place a long time ago, probably when the mainframe was in complete isolation and you didn’t have to worry about things like “systems of engagement” sullying your mainframe.

Now it’s 2016 and we have consumers reaching our mainframes from their “connected” refrigerator, for example. Our infrastructure and applications span from a web gateway running on a virtualized Linux box, through a load balancer, on to a Solaris or (gasp) Windows application, then finally on to a transaction processing system on the mainframe.

There’s no silo in team

Chances are your enterprise is siloed. You could have one team that monitors the mainframe, a team for Windows, a team for Linux, and on it goes. Or you might have a team that monitors this application and that application, and then, separately, the mainframe team. Best-case scenario is that you have one team for the mainframe and another team for everything else. So, what’s the alternative?

Imagine an application that allows you to monitor your entire enterprise on a single interface. Yes, o-n-e application, or, a single pane of glass. Now, you may be thinking that like unicorns, single panes of glass are mythical creatures and simply don’t exist. I disagree, but let’s put that thought aside for now to cover in a future post.

Through the single pane of looking-glass

Instead, let’s talk about the advantages of a single pane of glass. First, it allows our mainframe to be monitored right alongside the rest of our infrastructure. This allows our IT Operations staff (aka the “Help Desk”), which is made up of IT generalists, to monitor the mainframe without really knowing a lot about it.

A single pane of glass also provides a single source of truth rather than sixteen different applications stating that all the pieces under their remit are fine. This offers a complete picture of end-to-end operations, from the business’s health to any alerts that may need to be acted upon. Finally, we don’t have to train our generalists (or have completely separate help desks) to use archaic 3270 type applications. By moving from a siloed model to a single pane of glass, businesses can streamline their operations, reducing the risk of lengthy, costly periods of downtime.

Stay tuned: next time we’ll talk about what a single pane of glass is and how we can achieve it.

How is your business moving towards greater collaboration in infrastructure management or is it still stuck in silos? Leave us a comment below.

There’s no silo in team: the cost of playing the blame game

The post There’s no silo in team: the cost of playing the blame game appeared first on Highlight.