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Monitoring & ObservabilityOrganizations often mistakenly approach storage data from a reactive stance. While it may be referred to as real-time monitoring, this type of monitoring only alerts IT leaders to events that have already occurred. The biggest problem is that looking at your storage performance in a reactive sense is not the most productive way to plan for long-term success.
When businesses rely on analyzing the data of what already happened in order to make decisions moving forward they get stuck in a reactive mode. Instead, by employing the help of consolidated reporting, IT leaders can manage and interpret storage data with a forward-looking approach.
Ignored Alarms: Is Real-Time Monitoring Effective?
Have you ever walked past a car alarm that was blaring and barely given it a second glance? When car alarms were first introduced, they drew a significant amount of attention. However, over time, the general population has become very complacent when it comes to these alarms. Now, rather than assuming there is a problem, people automatically assume that perhaps the car was bumped or that the alarm is going off for some other mistake. For the most part, car alarms are often ignored. The question is when everyone is ignoring the sound of an alarm, what good does it do?
Your storage environment may not have an actual alarm that goes off when there is a problem, but your IT team likely has become complacent regarding real-time monitoring. While storage resource management (SRM) did initially have a heavy focus on monitoring and alerting, alerts have now become so prevalent that they are all but ignored, much like a car alarm.
Consolidated Reporting Helps You Act, Not React
Consolidated reporting works differently, organizing a company’s independent data elements into a unified, visual analysis across the multi-vendor storage environment. Reports are refreshed regularly and are available at any time for efficient and digestible analysis.
Organizations often mistakenly approach storage data from a reactive stance. While reactive analysis can help IT leaders understand what happened in a specific situation, it is proactive analysis that will allow businesses to make changes that improve IT cost savings and infrastructure scalability.
Real-time monitoring fosters a business-as-usual mentality. IT teams get an alert and then react to it, causing them to only act when they observe changes that impact the storage environment. These monitoring tools are built to only look at the last 24 or 48 hours, maybe even a week, but this ties your IT team to the present, never allowing them to plan for the future. Consolidated reporting allows IT teams to use the storage data analysis to be prepared, to anticipate changes, and to plan ahead.
With Visual One Intelligence, for example, IT leaders receive a regular AI-driven email from an on-staff Visual One expert, alerting them to any problems as well as highlighting any opportunities. Within this email, IT leaders will receive notice if performance thresholds are being met before capacity thresholds. All of this is in addition to the reporting dashboard, which clients can access 24/7.
Consolidated reporting may be particularly important for geographically dispersed teams, keeping them all on the same page.
Today’s storage environments have become so duplicated that they have progressed beyond real-time monitoring, which means it’s time to move to the future. With proactive consolidated reporting, you can better anticipate the changing factors that play a critical role in the success of your organization. Harness the power of your storage data to forecast precise outcomes, track your growth trends, and improve performance. Schedule a demo to talk to a Visual One data expert.
Are you facing obstacles to effective storage capacity planning? Follow these three principles – and send us an email if you’re curious how Visual One Intelligence can help.
Principle One: Collect & Analyze Data from All Levels of Your Storage Infrastructure
Principle Two: Build Models & Run Forecasts That are Tailored to Your Specific Environment and Goals
Principle Three: Use Consolidated Reporting to Ensure Your Capacity Planning Stays Reliable in Changing Environments
