Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

Recent conversations I've had with others in the IT Operations space helped formulate an idea I have been working on for a while concerning the future of Ops. The old mode of operating, you can call it ITIL based, or mode 1, or whatever you prefer is not going to be the primary mode of operations in the long term. Senior leadership has acknowledged this and made concerted efforts to change their habits of hiring, spending, and roadmaps for technology and delivery of new functionality. More advanced teams operating in an agile manner, or mode 2 consist of smaller more integrated teams made up of individuals with different skills. These teams are meeting today's digital business challenges. In most enterprises, these teams are part of a bimodal strategy, but bridging the gap between mode 1 and mode 2 is something few have solved. I'm personally not sure this is possible due to cultural and fundamental differences in beliefs and trust. In many organizations, there is a ...

  I've always been a fan of trying to solve complicated problems. As an end user, I applied various technologies and tools to diagnose some strange ones over the years. Applications have become increasingly decoupled and distributed requiring the monitoring and diagnostics to change significantly. Let's look at a short timeline of the changes which have occurred, why these changes were necessary, how they helped solve a technological shift, and which challenges remain. Phase Why How Overcome Component monitoring Distributed systems became pervasive High-end solutions (CA, BMC, HP, BMC) became commoditized (Solarwinds) Event correlation Too many monitoring tools (still applies) created information overload Enterprises rely on antiquated tools, many have given up. Log analytics Diagnostics too challenging in distributed systems Splunk unlocked it, but ELK has commoditized it. Front-end monitoring Customer centricity is the key for digital busi...