The Cost Of Not Having Someone Managing Your SolarWinds Platform

Marketing has asked me to write a blog about ROI on our newly launched SolarWinds® Managed Administrator Services and why SolarWinds customers need this service, and what the cost of not having it might be; excellent, I thought a 16-word blog! “Time, Resource & Knowledge on your monitoring platform is something you probably don’t have, but we do” apparently, they want 500 words, so I must work a little harder 😊

So, I’ve taken instead to break down the common areas where any monitoring solution needs love and attention and what happens to the platform and the business when Time, Resource & Knowledge is unavailable.

Health and Platform Performance

There are disciplines in performance monitoring. Ultimately, these are underpinned by the correct configurations of core elements. We have often seen unstable platforms where the hardware elements were designed some 4-5 years ago. At that time, they were matched to the existing or expected volume we had. Still, in the last two years, more nodes have been added, and we have adjusted the periodic polling elements, the result being that now the box is stretched. We are suffering outages, gaps in data and issues with SQL databases. Regular reviews of these platforms and adjusting configurations are key to getting consistency within the platform. Without reviews and routine maintenance, the platform underperforms, resulting in inconsistent data and stakeholders losing faith in the information it provides.
This can lead the business to reevaluate the monitoring toolset and make new investments when the problem is resourcing or the required knowledge to maintain it.

Fine Tuning to Business Needs

So here we are; if ten commandments existed for IT Monitoring, then one surely would be: “Thou shalt not leave thy monitoring tool in its default “wizard install configuration.”

No vendor on this planet knows what is suitable for your business operations; key areas here are Alerting, User Interface Customisation, Device Grouping & Automation, Dashboards & Reporting. Let me explain further what the costs of not getting this right mean to the business:

• Alerting – Floods of messages and false positives, without filtering out the noise, we humans ignore everything. We then miss the ones that matter. When that happens suddenly, we all start pointing at each other.
• Device Grouping & Automating tasks – Done correctly, the monitoring tool will discover the new node by looking at the AD domain and placing it in its correct profile group. All done without human intervention and with correct alerting for that device group, you get alerts for that new device. A great post by one of the other engineers on this topic exists should you want to delve deeper.
• Dashboards & Reporting – Example, the CIO sees no output from the monitoring tool; all they hear is when there are issues. Then they ask for data, which is not very proactive and not helpful, especially when you need further investment in the tool or its yearly subscription renewed.

Other stakeholders need some monitoring views too. Depending on their roles, NOC views, helpdesk, Board level, Engineers, Application teams, etc. I could go on and on here. The correct information to the right people brings about inclusion and makes future decisions and investments much quicker and easier to justify; the opposite of those things are delays, incorrect conclusions and possibly bad investments, which can be costly.

Monitoring Integrations

Often, integrating monitoring to other IT tools is last in the list of to-dos. We often have conversations with customers about what good looks like to them. Without fail, integrating is on the wish list because it saves so much time if tools talk to each other, share information correctly, automate repetitive, tedious tasks.

Question who here has a rock-solid up to date CMDB 😊?

Bi-directionally synchronising CMDB and ITSM data repositories with SolarWinds ensures all your device configurations and custom properties are kept up to date. It is helping you to keep track of the state of endpoint devices, software and data, useful to detection and response to security incidents. Aligning with the service desk solution is another essential integration. Here, SolarWinds can automatically raise or close tickets depending on the data it sees; routing the information through and making sure the correct people receive it is crucial when downtime is experienced and helps to restore services quickly without significantly affecting productivity.

What can be done?

The cost to the business when any of the above points manifest is impossible to forecast. Still, it’s fair to say you have experienced some of them already in your careers, and they have affected productivity. This article emphasises pain points, specifically with monitoring aspects, but it’s fair to say that the enemy is time, resource and knowledge. Prosperon Networks are ideally situated to remove those pain points either through our Managed Services offering. We assume ongoing responsibility for the entire platform or through our Professional Services, where we engage with you to address critical specifics on a short-term basis. If you would like to talk to us about these types of engagements, don’t hesitate to get in touch with your dedicated account manager.