Reporting & Monitoring: Overview

The need to report on and monitor IT infrastructure in terms of general performance as well as its contribution to the business has continued to increase in terms of importance and priority. It it is our experience that this need to understand the infrastructure and its function is the result of a number of key drivers:

1. Business Alignment – It is already stated in numerous places on our website that IT and the business are increasingly becoming more closely aligned. IT is now even regarded by many of our customers as a means of competitive edge and a significant source of contribution to the business. It is therefore crucial to understand how IT is supporting and enabling the organisations to reach its goals and objectives.

2. Service Oriented Architecture – Linked to the above is the fact that more and more organisations are placing formal expectations on the performance of their IT function. Now that technology is seen as having a direct effect on the performance and function of the business, it becomes key that IT departments understand the expectation placed on them and that this can be measured. More and more businesses are placing formal SLA’s on their IT function to ensure that IT can support the business, which again further drives the need to monitor and understand the infrastructure.

3. Regulatory Compliance – The last few years has seen a whole host of regulations come into force across all types of industry. It has been our experience that whilst these have not necessarily dictated anything specific to the IT provision of an organisation (although some examples do exist) they generally drive a need to understand to a greater degree what exists in an organisations IT infrastructure and gaining visibility of this is a key enabling component behind this understanding. At Point to Point our approach to this area is twofold:

• Firstly we approach the area of monitoring from a ‘solution’ rather than ‘system’ perspective. In this sense we have an end-to-end offering that looks to 'understand' the complete solution being delivered to the end-user as there is always more than one system involved in this and it is crucial to understand how all aspects are performing, as well as their relationships with, and effects on, one another. The aim of approaching matters in this way is to try and understand what level of performance is being presented to the end-user. Performance issues ultimately affect end-user productivity so understanding if a particular server is healthy or not is not as useful as understanding why an end-user is experiencing delays even when specific machines appear to be healthy.

• Secondly, monitoring and reporting is one of those areas of technology that can 'swallow' significant amounts of investment and take a long time to deliver value to an organisation.

At Point to Point we have been careful to partner with technology that is not intrusive, does not take months to implement and configure, and is ultimately cost-effective. (Many organisations we speak to have been put off alternative monitoring and reporting solutions by how much they will cost and how long they will take before they are contributing - factors our approach has addressed).

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