Life of a "user" (you know, the people who actually use our IT Infrastructure to do their day-to-day work) is not simple. Not only does our company expect them to do the work they are assigned to do, but we often do not realize how tough their life really is. I spoke with a large customer yesterday and he summed up the IT Systems and Applications they had running. More than 18.000 Servers (every possible flavor), and two Mainframes running a mix of legacy and "modern" applications. Almost all with different interfaces and often not as easy to work with as we like to think..... Some users in this particular company had to work with more than 15 different applications, all with different interfaces. It's workable, people live cope with it, until there is a performance issue......
The first question often is: is there really a performance issue? Some applications work faster than others and sometimes it's the perception of the user. So the user spends some time figuring out if it's him/her, the PC he/she is working with, or the application. After he/she concludes that it must be the application, he/she opens an issue in the Helpdesk. And then they start receiving emails about changes and progress. The Helpdesk investigates, and if they have the right tools, they can sometimes confirm that there IS an issue. Often, this requires 1-2 calls with the end-user ("try this", reboot, "try that", etc.). But then, the real road to hell starts.... Without the right tools, many departments will be involved to investigate: administrators, operations, network experts, application experts, Distributed database experts, Mainframe operational experts, CICS experts, MQ specialists, DB2 DBA's and many, many more. And every time, the end-user will receive status changes in his mailbox and often will be asked to perform little tests.
In the meantime, more and more users will experience the same problems, call the helpdesk, open new tickets with slightly different descriptions etc. Mayhem... And we wonder why end-users sometimes lose confidence in our IT Infrastructure....
The fact that we are firefighting in our little silos is often very obvious to our users. And it costs our company a lot of money.... We all know that the first step to fight firefighting (....) is automation. Use solutions that monitor trends, solutions that are aware of what the baselines are and that warn us when things start to change slightly. Because this is often a sign that soon, things will start to go wrong. And these solutions should be smart enough to tell the Helpdesk staff AND our Level 1-2-3 staff where the problem occurs. Not what component is experiencing problems, but what application is having issues. So we speak the same language as the user.... This way, we can investigate what to be investigated, and not what we think should be investigated... Today's applications cross multiple networks, platforms, databases and protocols. Manual monitoring simply is not up to the task and only an integrated set of Application performance Management solutions that uses automation to monitor and alert can help us to keep the lives of our end-users (our customers) simple. Find out more about solutions that will not only make your life easier, but that will help you to become a hero in the eyes of the end-users:
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