Managers Need To Understand Engineering To Make Most Of Monitoring
from the it's-not-going-to-install-itself dept
Monitoring of IT infrastructures involves the abstraction of the detailed technical implementation into a collation of information that matches the business requirements. It’s not as simple as ‘installing the system’ and away we go. There can be many challenges of selecting and monitoring variables for a given system, and the results may need to be interpreted by an Engineer who can consider the operational environment to understand the complete system before drawing conclusions. Several considerations may rely solely on the engineer to have knowledge of the business platform at an operational and a strategic level.
However, in many business, an engineer is not a part of the business level processes. Dissemination of the current business strategy and forward planning is not typically part of an engineer’s life. But to get the most from your Application Monitoring, you are required to be able to interpret the data in the light of the current business expectations. That makes for a tidy conundrum.
For Application Monitoring to be effective, Business Managers and Service Owners will need to get involved and learn, comprehend and understand the data that is being presented to them. This involvement will require their technical involvement to understand the data collection processes, the limitations that this creates on the reporting and how the system can be adapted to meet their requirements. This can be a challenge for Management types, who have often moved into soft skills and lost touch with the harsh realities of hard skills (i.e. It works/doesn’t work vs “We can define what works”) and will resist becoming part of the solution.
Part of deploying an Application Performance Monitoring system is getting engagement from stakeholders, but specifically, managers will need to engage technically to make the most from the system. This is no different from the skills managers need to navigate an Accounting system, it’s just not part of the manager’s job description, and may take a while to learn the ropes.
