Footprints found on customer's premises...

"...and that's OK!"

Trying to manage IT without any management technology on-premise is sort of like going on vacation with your spouse and periodically calling your mature and self-sufficient (yeah right!) children and asking how things are going.  


It seems the perception of On Demand is that all components run/should run completely remotely over the web.  Obviously the focus by this perception is on the delivery model and less with the actual end goal of having IT managed most effectively toward business objectives.

Some business applications can be run completely remotely over the web.  With IT management software On Demand, it is the exception rather that rule that nothing is installed at the customer site.

There are a number of factors that influence this architecture such as automation, integration, continuity, performance, security policy, and cultural preference.  Automation, integration, continuity, and performance are leading influencers.


Automation

There has been a lot of emphasis placed on 'agentless' over the last few years.  Almost predictably over the recent past, companies being asked to cut IT costs looked at areas that seemed intuitively as low-hanging fruit.  Anything with an agent seemed to be a B.A.D. thing.  And so the solution dejour became 'agentless' solutions.  However, these technologies typically ONLY do monitoring, but do nothing on the actual management or administrative automation side (both break/fix and maintenance) where a large part of the value resides.  So now these companies have agentless monitoring, but they now also have more systems being monitored - because it is easy to deploy - and more alerts are flooding in to administrators to take manual corrective actions - because they got rid of their automation products which happen to be agent-based and bundled monitoring and automation together.  This manual management has not only actually reduced the level of IT productivity but the levels of productivity possible!

So instead of swinging the pendelum completely from one side to the other, there is a balance that must be struck between agentless and agent-based solutions.  Practical application of the technology toward business goals is what's needed.

I'll be covering lots more about other automation topics in future entries.


Integration

For continuing productivity and cost effectiveness, IT operations, support, and planning functions are becoming more integrated along process lines.  And with this so are the IT management technologies.  

Because the end-all IT management system does not exist today, many IT management On Demand services come as either bundled services (e.g. a service desk/change mgmt/SLA system) or as completely discrete services (e.g. web transaction monitoring).  These IT management On Demand services must be able to integrate with other IT management technologies and services in the management architecture that both reside on-premise and off.

So it is common to see mid-tier systems that sit on-premise for integration and queuing information between an On Demand service and on-premise systems.

Continuity and Performance

Certain IT management technologies process A LOT of data.  Think about an On Demand capacity planning service for a second.  From a data stand-point, this is certainly not just a group of sales people entering a few a leads per week into a forms-based application.  This is collecting a massive amount of system-level data every ten seconds or some other very frequent basis.  

Capacity planning requires a set of metrics that are not even available via technologies such as SNMP.  In addition, for bandwidth management and continuity purposes an on-premise staging platform is required to stream data back to the service.

For forms-based systems where integration with other systems is not necessary, remote services without any footprint on-premise makes sense.  Increasingly however, we are seeing more and more integrations between IT processes.


Have to run now -- got to call my nanny and see how things are going with the kids...


Cheers 'til next time!