Observability has brought a new approach to IT infrastructure management, easing the workload on IT admins across the world and bringing more accuracy and efficiency. One of the clear beneficiaries of this evolution in IT infrastructure management is incident response.
Incident response is the systematic process of identifying, analyzing, and mitigating security threats, breaches, or operational issues to minimize their impact on the continuity of business operations.
With observability into the infrastructure, IT teams become more adept at identifying alerts quickly and are more responsive in tackling network incidents. Now, IT teams can recognize the failure of network components in real time and plan for fast mitigation.
Evolving IT infrastructure
The ever-evolving complexity of IT infrastructure is a challenge that IT admins and organizations have to adapt to relentlessly and overcome. The modern IT infrastructures have moved from a largely monolithic approach to highly customizable models; which varies in terms of the composition of environments, scale, and technology stack for each organization.
The emergence of cloud infrastructures provided organizations with more opportunities to design an IT infrastructure to fit within their budget, convenience, and personnel. Cloud infrastructures enable organizations to perform business operations with virtual resources, without having to spend greatly on capital or operations.
Also, microservices are an essential part of a cloud environment. A single application will be composed of many independent smaller components or services. These services will have their own technology stack and database. The combination of cloud-native and microservices architectures is changing IT infrastructure by enabling organizations to build and deploy applications quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively. Organizations can scale their applications up or down as needed with ease by breaking down monolithic applications into smaller, more manageable components.
What are the challenges presented by modern infrastructures ?
The modern hybrid, multi-cloud environment presents new challenges due to the varying layers of services and endpoints that have to be monitored. This leads to a situation where, although cutting-edge infrastructures bring a lot of value at a business level, the complexity of managing these operations has increased the workload for IT admins.When a network incident happens, the layers and volume of information that IT admin personnel have to sift through is humungous. The following are some of the challenges IT admins are faced with:
Increased complexity: Cloud-native and microservices architectures can increase the complexity of IT infrastructure, and make it more difficult to identify and resolve incidents. These architectures involve multiple components that are distributed across different environments, which can make it challenging to trace the root cause of an incident.
Lack of visibility: With cloud-native and microservice architectures, it can be difficult to gain visibility into the entire IT infrastructure. These architectures involve multiple components that are distributed across different environments, which can make it challenging to monitor and manage the entire infrastructure.
New tools and processes: Modern hybrid cloud architectures require new tools and processes for incident response. This is because traditional tools and processes may not be effective in identifying and resolving incidents. New tools also demand more upskilling and training for IT personnel in an organization. This only adds to the complexity and slows down progress and adoption of new technologies.
Increased automation: Cloud-native and microservices architectures involve a high degree of automation, which can make it challenging for IT admins to identify and resolve incidents manually. Automation can mask the underlying issues that are causing incidents.
Incident response can be made quick, precise, and efficient with observability
IT infrastructure management software powered by observability can improve incident management in several ways. Here are some of the benefits of using observability for incident management:
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Comprehensive view of IT infrastructure: Observability provides a comprehensive view of the entire IT infrastructure, including applications, services, and networks. This allows IT teams to identify issues before they become major problems and take corrective action quickly.
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Faster incident resolution: By using observability, IT teams can reduce the time it takes to resolve incidents, which can help minimize downtime and improve customer satisfaction.
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Automated incident management: IT infrastructure management software powered by observability can help organizations automate incident management. By using ML algorithms, these tools can analyze data from multiple sources to identify patterns and predict potential issues. This allows IT teams to take proactive measures to prevent incidents from occurring in the first place.
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Improved incident response times: IT infrastructure management software, powered by observability, can help organizations improve their incident response times. By providing real-time visibility into the entire IT infrastructure, these tools enable IT teams to identify the root cause of an incident quickly and take corrective action.
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Proactive issue identification: Observability enables IT teams to identify issues before they become major problems. By using ML algorithms, these tools can analyze data from multiple sources to identify patterns and predict potential issues.
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Reduced downtime: IT teams can minimize downtime and reduce the impact of incidents on business operations by identifying issues before they become major problems.
Achieve efficiency and proactivity in incident management with observability-powered OpManager Plus
Monitor and improve network performance: Network observability and insights play a crucial role in mitigating network incidents. Identifying potential bottlenecks is critical, as any unexpected problems can prove to be disruptive. Valuable insights can be gained by consistently monitoring network performance and analyzing network traffic. These insights serve as a safeguard against network interruptions and ensure the smooth progression of network and business operations.
Manage your dynamic environments with adaptive thresholds: OpManager Plus harnesses the power of ML and AI to continually monitor dynamic performance metric data, forecast highly reliable values, and automatically set optimal thresholds.
Automate your routine maintenance and L1 fault management tasks: OpManager Plus comes with a user-friendly drag-and-drop workflow automation builder. This enables the automation of repetitive maintenance and L1 fault management tasks that can strain resources and consume considerable time. Unlike external workflow automation tools which lack seamless integration, OpManager Plus boasts an in-house workflow automation builder with robust capabilities. The workflow’s capabilities significantly enhance troubleshooting processes and contribute to a substantial reduction in network incidents.
Forecast resource crunch and proactively provision your network: With OpManager Plus, you can effectively assess your enterprise’s future bandwidth requirements using capacity planning reports. This data-driven approach enables you to make informed decisions regarding necessary infrastructure changes. Moreover, it enables you to minimize bandwidth and storage related network incidents.
Perform error-free, time-efficient configuration changes: OpManager Plus empowers you to efficiently address issues, enhance security, and optimize performance by automating bulk configuration changes across your network devices using Configlets. These configuration script templates not only save you time, but also shield your infrastructure from potential errors.
Avoid disasters by staying proactive: Hardware failures, erratic network patterns, and software crashes are inevitable in a network infrastructure. Although these incidents are damaging to the performance of the entire business, they can turn truly disastrous only if there was no warning beforehand. OpManager Plus’ IT operations monitoring will give you a heads-up in case anything goes wrong. With features like adaptive thresholds and forecasting reports, OpManager Plus is a must-have monitoring tool to minimize network incidents and achieve smooth network incident management.
Explore the array of capabilities OpManager Plus offers by downloading a free, 30-day trial. Schedule a demo with our experts for a technical walk-through and get a price quote. Visit our extensive set of pages to take a deeper dive into observability and everything beyond that OpManager Plus has to offer.
