Featured Article
Monitoring is Not Management
by Matthew Zito, Chief Scientist

I'm not sure where IT's infatuation with "enterprise monitoring" originated, but I have a theory that it stems from the Star Wars movies.  There's something about the typical enterprise monitoring systems - their dashboard notices, network maps, and flashing alerts - that seems an awful lot like the Death Star. 

It's a little unfair, of course, to compare a monitoring system to a battle station capable of destroying planets.  But, the infatuation remains.  Just about every company has a monitoring infrastructure in place, and many of them put it on display; lots of NOC operators, monitors, and plasma TVs giving the current status of the infrastructure.

The question of whether these monitoring systems are worth their multi-million dollar purchase and operational cost is a subject for another article.  However, there's no question that, in an ideal world, monitoring systems would be rendered unnecessary.  If everything was secure, stable, and performing up to SLAs, all of those flashing lights and emails with ALERT in the subject line would be a thing of the past.  Administrators could spend their time administering instead of "break-fixing" - making things better, instead of simply fixing what's there. 

This is what's wrong with monitoring - it's not management.  At the core it's the difference between "passive" and "active."  Monitoring is akin to passively waiting for something to go wrong, while managing means figuring out why something went wrong and making sure it doesn't go wrong again. Even better, one could spend time building systems that are as fault-tolerant as possible, so when something goes wrong, that event doesn’t have to be a critical outage.

I say this, of course, since GridApp makes a "management" solution.  We're helping you standardize the database creation process, automate patching, and track changes throughout your database environment.  I'm pleased that we don't do any monitoring - every product out there seems to address monitoring, but all this emphasis on monitoring reveals how broken things are.  If you could take your IT team's best practices, the security options, know exactly how every database is set up - couldn't you make better decisions about what is going on across IT?

I'm noticing more and more IT managers talking about improving their IT monitoring infrastructure, which seems like a quick fix rather than a long-term solution.  Even worse, sometimes they're calling it "improving their IT management infrastructure," which is inaccurate.   A number of the vendors aren't helping either, calling their monitoring software packages "management".    Monitoring solutions are necessary because IT is complex and systems break.  However, what if you shift that firefighting money and time to building the better IT mousetrap?  That's the difference between spending money and making money.  Wouldn't management like to see IT generating revenue rather than burning cash?

Let's be clear - passive vs. active. If a tool is simply telling you what's wrong, that's nothing but monitoring.  If the tool help you standardize, automate, and build better systems - systems that are more reliable and have less issues - that's real management.

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