Log Data Outranks Traditional Data Sources for Network Operations Management

Key phrase:: Network Operations – and that should be no surprise.

While the network is a important component of an APM initiative, it is usually the last area to participate collaboratively. (I’ve seen things!) And logs are always part of the APM toolset. But logs alone only help a few folks, leaving nothing for the application stakeholders.

Successful APM is achieved when all of the ‘traditional IT silos’ are contributing and participating – network, security, middleware, mainframe, operations. APM focuses on transaction and application characteristics but you cannot get to “root cause” unless the other silos participate – otherwise, full-on “blame game”. Getting those silos to collaborate – it’s all about the process – and not the technology – as this article reminds us.

So if your network group lives on logs – that’s cool. Can they baseline performance? Do they share the KPIs? Do they proactively notify when things ‘go south’? Do they post configuration changes so that you can correlate your transaction degradations with ongoing network issues?

Building data landfills, based on logs, and consumed by a few specialists – I don’t get the benefit. But reduce the data to KPIs and baselines, update proactively and contribute to the single view of end-2-end service performance… that’s what I would put some budget chips on! 😉