Every spring, I clear out the garage. Lost toys are found. Discarded power tools are recharged. And depleted BBQ supplies are restocked. Thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT), this annual event will soon become ancient history. Toys will notify me where they are. Tools will inform me when they are out of juice. And BBQ gas bottles will remind me when to buy more.

It’s predicted that more than 50 billion things will be connected to the Internet by 2020  – from cars and containers ships to thermostats and light bulbs.

But connecting things to the Internet is just the first step.

The multiplier effect

To ensure data keeps flowing, companies will have to keep every other component in the Internet of Things value chain connected and optimized too – from the cordless screwdriver in my garage to the virtual switches and SDN architectures in the data center.

So just as performance management became the bedrock of the IT infrastructure, it will become the bedrock of the Internet of Things too. With more than five billion machine-to-machine connections in the world already, businesses need to ensure their performance management approach can be scaled up and out to cope with a whole new generation of devices.

Managing legacy networks has taught us that the more devices you need to monitor and manage, the more complicated things get. Protocols evolve. Polling frequencies vary. Data formats multiply.

The result? Instead of a single unified performance management solution, IT departments often end up with copious fragmented tools that cause more problems than they solve.

IoT and the three V’s 

The performance management challenge with the IoT is going to be even bigger. To cope with such size and diversity, businesses will need to invest in flexible, extensible and scalable performance management solutions.

They will need solutions that can handle both the volume and variety of devices that support the IoT – both on the network and beyond.  For example, discovering assets, configuring monitoring profiles and aggregating data will not only need to be platform and protocol-agnostic, but also driven by automated workflows.

There’s also the issue of velocity.  The IoT will evolve rapidly. For example, the global market for wearable devices grew by more than 200 percent in 2015, with hints that connected clothing will become the latest rage. Think ski goggles that track your location and speed while letting you keep tabs on your friends.

Equal and opposite reaction 

Performance management solutions will need to be able to keep up. Because every new ‘thing’ that connects to the Internet at the front end will have ramifications for the network at the back end.

Although most solutions come with pre-certified device monitoring options, IT professionals will increasingly want to be able to self-certify not just new devices, but also the applications that make up part of the IoT ecosystem.

Applications will be fundamental to the IoT revolution, providing the presentation layer for the data that has been captured and analyzed from the billions of devices around the world. As a result, open application interfaces (Open APIs) will be critical to performance management, and should be a major consideration when investing in a new solution.

In our increasingly connected world, performance management solutions will need to be integrated like never before. They will have to interact with other IT monitoring tools; they will need to interface easily with analytics dashboards; they will need to talk to configuration management databases.

And, one day, they will need to integrate with the power tools in my garage.

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