Performance Management Automation

It is really great to see data center automation getting this type of attention from IT decision makers, however it appears to me that most of the automation being discussed is around patch management or server provisioning. Of course, automation can save a tremendous amount of effort in the performance management arena as well, but it seems that many IT decision makers do not know that these capabilities exist. Analytics-based solutions for performance management are available that learn the normal behavior of business, user experience and IT infrastructure metrics and correlate their behaviors to pinpoint problem areas and provide proactive alerting to possible problems. This eliminates the manual efforts of sifting through static threshold-based alerts and using human (or rule-based) correlation to try to determine the cause of problems in complex, multi-tier business services. These tools eliminate threshold management, significantly reduce false positive alerts and can actually use correlation techniques to predict re-occurring problems so they can be preempted. Analytics solutions for performance management provide tremendous labor savings to IT Operations and also provide the critical catalyst to achieving effective business service management (BSM) through correlation of business performance problems to the causes in the IT infrastructure. With 30% of the survey particpants engaging in a BSM initiative, it makes sense for analytics-based technologies to come to the forefront.

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