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Five Essentials of Modern IT Infrastructure Management

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Five Essentials of Modern IT Infrastructure Management

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gppp
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Five Essentials of

Modern IT Infrastructure
Management
FIVE ESSENTIALS OF MODERN IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT

The Hybrid Nature of IT Infrastructures


For businesses operating in today’s digital economy, there’s a premium on delivering
optimized user experiences—all the time and every time—while wringing maximum
agility, performance and value from the infrastructure. To meet these demands, the By 2020, 90 percent of organizations will
digital infrastructures that businesses rely on continue to grow increasingly dynamic
adopt hybrid infrastructure management.1
and elastic, diverse and dispersed.
–Gartner
Companies commonly rely on multiple public clouds, picking the right services that
are best aligned with each specific use case and objective. Application workloads More than 80 percent of companies use
continue to move to containers and microservices. In some cases, containerized a multi-cloud strategy, typically comprised
workloads are starting to be leveraged in place of virtualized workloads. IT teams are
of a hybrid cloud model which relies on
gradually adopting serverless computing approaches. For organizations running their
public and private clouds.2
internal private clouds and on-premises business services, the use of hyper-converged
–CIO
infrastructures continues to grow.

With all these various trends emerging, change continues to get more rapid, making
predictions about the future difficult. The only thing that does seem certain is that
environments will only get more hybrid in nature moving forward.

Traditional Dynamic Private Cloud Public Cloud SaaS

+ + + +

Monitoring Tool 1 Monitoring Tool 2 Monitoring Tool 3 Monitoring Tool 4 Monitoring Tool 5

2
FIVE ESSENTIALS OF MODERN IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT

The Challenge: Lacking Visibility Across Hybrid Environments


For the IT teams responsible for the quality of the user experience, today’s hybrid Ultimately, these disjointed toolsets significantly inhibit
environments pose a new set of challenges. When a customer interacts with the agility. Application rollouts are delayed because of
business’ mobile app, for example, that interaction may now be contingent upon the the time it takes to roll out the required monitoring
performance and integration of a wide range of infrastructures, including cloud and capability. Likewise, the adoption of new technologies
on-premises, traditional and dynamic. When issues arise, determining what the cause takes too much time because a new monitoring tool
is, where it is and how to fix it continues to get more difficult. Further, this lack of visibility needs to be procured, configured and deployed.
means IT teams can only react to issues after customers’ experience is degraded.

In the digital economy, businesses need to be able to proactively track performance,


and gain the insights required to spot troubling trends and address issues, before the
customer ever notices there’s a problem. Siloed

IT teams have been saddled with running multiple monitoring tools because no single
tool had been implemented that could deliver coverage of the entire environment.
Because teams are using disparate monitoring technologies, IT staff has to dedicate
massive amounts of time and effort to tool configuration and maintenance, and to Monitoring Tool Monitoring Tool
aggregating data from across systems in order to generate reports. Ultimately, these
realities have a number of repercussions:
Monitoring Tool Monitoring Tool Monitoring Tool
• The user experience is suboptimal far too often.

• Staff productivity and morale are poor.

• Staff lack a clear understanding of utilization trends, which either means sufficient
resources aren’t always available when needed or money is wasted on excess
Physical Storage Database Public Big
infrastructure and cloud resource investments. and Virtual and Private Data
Servers Cloud

3
FIVE ESSENTIALS OF MODERN IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT

Key Imperatives for Modern Infrastructures


To manage and optimize their modern digital infrastructures, today’s IT teams need to take a new approach. To succeed in meeting their
objectives, these teams have to leverage tools that address these requirements:

Dynamic policy-based Unified monitoring


configuration: 1 2 and analytics:
A standard automated approach to An out-of-the-box unified solution
monitoring deployments. that covers the entire IT infrastructure;
on-premises platforms, cloud services or
a hybrid of both.

Extensibility: 5 3 Contextual intelligence:


A simplified approach to integration Augmented infrastructure monitoring
and support for new technologies. tools with artificial intelligence (AI)-driven
analysis capabilities; AIOps.

Automation:
Automated discovery and deployment capabilities
that adapt to evolving environments.

4
FIVE ESSENTIALS OF MODERN IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT

Dynamic Policy-Based Configuration


Today’s environments are too dynamic to rely on cumbersome configuration efforts. These dynamic platforms also need to feature capabilities
To support agile and DevOps approaches, monitoring needs to be deployed quickly. for intelligent alarm configuration, enabling dynamic
When teams need to deploy monitoring for a new infrastructure technology or baselines and thresholds that help reduce false alarms.
application, the process should be a low-touch, automated and turnkey.

In today’s environments, time to monitor is a critical metric for IT teams to track and
“In today’s hybrid cloud and DevOps
improve. Through dynamic policy-based configuration, IT teams can make significant centric environments, you can no longer
gains in reducing time to monitor metrics. By implementing a standardized automated take hours to deploy monitoring for your
approach to monitoring deployments, IT organizations can better support rapid infrastructure. You need a standardized,
deployments and improve infrastructure performance. rapid approach for configuration to boost
Monitoring tools should provide dynamic discovery capabilities, so as new systems staff productivity and protect IT Ops.”
or services come online, they can be automatically detected and have appropriate –Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director - Cloud,
Containers, DevOps and AI -Enterprise Management
monitoring configurations applied. These discovery capabilities should have the
Associates, Inc.
intelligence to determine the resource and type of technology, no matter the
environment. For example, in the cloud, the platform should be able to discover and
distinguish between a new Amazon EC2 instance and Amazon RDS, or an Apache®
server versus Microsoft SQL Server®. This approach also reduces technology-specific Policy
complexities and enables staff to adopt new technologies faster. Dev
Production
At the same time, tools should offer the ability to consistently enforce controls. Thresholds Public
Templates should be available that enable both consistency and efficiency in the Cloud
application of monitoring configurations for similar resources. Tools should provide Alarms
Storage
templates that have been developed based on industry best practices for each Triggers
specific technology and environment.

5
FIVE ESSENTIALS OF MODERN IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT

Unified Monitoring and Analytics


IT teams need a single view into their entire environment. Whether they are running “Whether an enterprise has a dedicated
traditional infrastructures, containers, hyperconverged infrastructures, multiple clouds
network operations center (NOC), a
or all of the above, they need a unified way to monitor it all. They should be able to
cross-domain operations center, or
get proactive, actionable insights and correlation across various elements.
something else, full-stack, hybrid cloud
To meet their mandates for providing excellent user experiences, IT teams need a visibility is no longer a secondary
unified solution that delivers out-of-the-box coverage of the entire IT infrastructure, requirement. It is essential.”
whether the environment is comprised of on-premises platforms, cloud services or a
–Shamus McGillicuddy, Senior Analyst Network
hybrid combination of both. They should also be able to get comprehensive coverage, & Hybrid Infrastructure Management Enterprise
not only of their environments but of the various data types that are needed, including Management Associates, Inc.
performance, availability, anomalies and log data.

Monitoring tools should also offer an interface that enables intuitive, flexible
capabilities for slicing data in different ways, including by specific applications,
infrastructure elements, development and test environments, and more. Unified

With these capabilities, IT organizations can realize a number of benefits. Instead


of being relegated to lengthy all-hands triage calls and finger-pointing associated
with having different infrastructure or application teams working with their own tools,
organizations can boost team productivity and collaboration. In addition, IT teams
can speed resolution when issues arise, and gain the predictive insights they need to
address potential problems before they have any impact on the user experience. Physical Storage Database Public Big
and Virtual and Private Data
Servers Cloud

6
FIVE ESSENTIALS OF MODERN IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT

AI-Driven Contextual Intelligence

As IT environments continue to grow more complex and dynamic, the


volumes of monitoring data being generated continue to grow rapidly. Gartner estimates that
Relying on disparate tools and approaches, IT teams are ill-equipped currently, only five percent
to manage and analyze all the data being generated. Staff members of businesses have an AIOps
struggle to manually correlate different types of data. For example,
platform in place, however
they are challenged with correlating log and metric data. They also
struggle to correlate infrastructure and non-infrastructure intelligence,
in the next two years that
such as network or application code errors. In addition, these teams number is expected to grow
can’t effectively correlate business and infrastructure data, which makes to 25 percent.3
it difficult to understand how infrastructure issues affect business users –Gartner
and performance.

To contend with these challenges, IT teams need to augment


infrastructure monitoring tools with artificial intelligence (AI)-driven
analysis capabilities, also known as AIOps. Through AIOps, tools
can gain the power needed to correlate infrastructure data with
intelligence from across the organization, including network, application
and business intelligence. Leveraging tools with machine learning
algorithms and anomaly detection, IT teams can more intelligently
track trends to identify when abnormal situations arise, and they
can gain predictive insights that fuel enhanced issue prevention and
improved resource management.

7
FIVE ESSENTIALS OF MODERN IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT

Automation
Today’s IT teams are under constant pressure, facing demands to do
more with less while at the same time helping to ensure superior service
levels. To respond, they must make automation a key pillar of their
infrastructure management and monitoring strategy.

As outlined above, automated discovery of new systems, as well as


automated deployment of monitoring of these new elements, is vital
in order to support today’s dynamic infrastructures and DevOps
environments. IT teams also need to ensure dashboards and reports
can automatically be adapted to evolving environments, and
automatically generated and refreshed.

Moving forward, IT teams will also need to leverage capabilities for


automated response and remediation workflows. For Instance, once a
potential bottleneck is spotted by monitoring software, it could trigger
a workflow by passing over information to collaboration tools, or trigger
a remediation process by connecting to a management or automation
tool—for example, a potential utilization bottleneck is identified and a
new cloud server (e.g., AWS EC2) is provisioned. As a result, potential
disasters can be avoided and IT teams’ time saved.

8
FIVE ESSENTIALS OF MODERN IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT

Extensibility
As technological innovation continues to accelerate and requirements continue to
evolve, IT teams need to be able to respond with maximum agility and speed. It is
critical that monitoring tools effectively support these objectives. “In the modern, Cloud era, use open
Tools need to support a wide range of technologies and environments, and as new
not necessarily opensource tools that
systems are employed, the process of establishing monitoring coverage of these new allow you to manage and integrate
technologies needs to be fast and easy, whether through APIs or intuitive, wizard- with new technologies easily.”
based interfaces. Monitoring tools also need to support easy and efficient integration –David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Officer, Deloitte
with other IT operations management tools, including service desk platforms, DevOps Consulting
management tools, network monitoring platforms and more. This capability is
essential to making your operation future-proof in a world that’s built to change.

9
FIVE ESSENTIALS OF MODERN IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT

Introducing CA Unified Infrastructure Management


CA Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM) provides a single, analytics-driven
solution for proactively and efficiently managing modern, cloud and hybrid IT Forrester
infrastructures. CA UIM is the only IT monitoring solution that provides intelligent Consulting
analytics, comprehensive coverage and an open, extensible architecture. By leveraging stats:4
the solution, your organization can speed mean time to repair, reduce monitoring
efforts, accelerate new deployments and improve the end-user experience.

• Out-of-the-box integrations with over 200 technologies provide immediate value

• Policy-based automated configuration is designed for today’s DevOps environments

• Open extensible architecture helps you integrate and customize to your unique needs 321%
Total return on investment
• Integration with powerful AIOps solution provides contextual intelligence with CA UIM

• Available as SaaS and on-premises solution

Percentage
reduction
in incidents
requiring triage 50%
Total
67%
administration
labor savings
associated with
CA UIM

10
FIVE ESSENTIALS OF MODERN IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT

For more information, visit ca.com/uim


CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities
of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management
and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate—across mobile, private
and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments.
1 CIO Drive, “Is multi-cloud the answer? Most companies are using up to five,”
2 Gartner, “Gartner Says a Massive Shift to Hybrid Infrastructure Services Is Underway”
3 Gartner, "How AIOps takes IT companies from reactive to proactive"
4 Benefits realized for a composite organization created for The Total Economic Impact™ Of CA Unified Infrastructure Management, a March 2018 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of CA,
“The Total Economic Impact of CA Unified Infrastructure Management”
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OpenStack community. Salesforce is a trademark of Salesforce.com, inc. Forrester is the trademark of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your
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