IT Operations Management (ITOM) is data intensive. Tools that manage servers, network devices and applications collect and process "management data" - performance metrics, configuration states, events, alerts, tickets and statistics, just to name a few. The larger the environment, the larger the data volume, all which needs to be stored and managed.
In the old world, the burden was on the IT operations team to provision and manage the large databases required for their on-premise ITOM tools. Managing the databases and the servers behind them is a non-trivial task and one more operational cost requiring server and rack space, investment, and people resources for IT ops to maintain. This real cost grows proportionally with the size of your environment and the onus was on you to deal with it, not your on-prem ITOM vendor who deployed and ran (or may still be deploying).
With the advent of SaaS based ITOM tools, data management costs can be eliminated for the enterprise. The SaaS vendor deals with data storage, archiving and infrastructure management of the tool, and at significantly less cost with economies of scale across thousands of customers. You benefit not only from the lower cost of IT operations, but also by killing the operational risk that the SaaS vendor now assumes.
To deliver enterprise grade ITOM capabilities, your SaaS vendor must be able to manage data at Big Data scale - petabytes of data across thousands of customers. Data management must be a core competency for your SaaS vendor.
Make sure you’re asking the right questions about the scalability of your SaaS ITOM solution:
- Can you handle my data volume? Your environment will generate hundreds of metrics per device every minute. Your vendor's architecture must be able to keep up wih this volume and support your demands as your environment grows.
- Can I visualize my data in real time? You need real time visibility into your operational health. Your SaaS tool must be able to process and visualize data without any lag.
- Can you mine my data to give me useful analytics? As analytics capabilities become more sophisticated, know that analytics will be gated and limited by how data is organized and accessed. Find out what your vendor’s roadmap looks like for building analytics into the tool.
Vistara processes over a billion metrics per day. With our massively scalable data platform, we are able to deliver high performance and availability and achieve real-time information processing.
Can your ITOM vendor handle high volumes and velocity data?
