Back to the Future with Single Pane of Glass

Grant Glading, Head of Sales and Marketing at Interlink Software talks about lessons to be taken from IT monitoring history and Single Pane of Glass views …

As the saying goes ‘Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it’

I’ve been working for large organisations for a long time. Since the early 90s in fact. That’s the 1990s not the 1890s – cheeky!

In the 90s I saw the move from mainframe-centric computing to open systems and client/server computing. Along with this came the rapid accumulation of domain-specific monitoring and administration tools.

It’s information overload for the IT staff trying to monitor these tools individually. Joining the dots, understanding the health and well-being of the business services underpinned by the myriad interfaces and overlapping outputs.

The tools du jour are the DevOps staples of Jenkins, Docker, Ansible, Nagios, Jira, Maven, etc., etc. I could go on ad nauseam. And yet, well into the 21st century, I’m seeing the very same patterns of behaviour emerge in large corporates as I witnessed back then.

There is no single, overarching view, consolidating all of the monitoring tools and discerning what they’re trying to tell us in all their glorious red, amber, green, RAG status widgets and dials.

Sure, REST-based web services APIs often help simplify integration. But the real imperative is to identify what all these events, metrics and exceptions mean in business terms?

Luckily, organisations like the one I’m part of have been working with forward-thinking clients from a variety of industries, and are taking steps to avoid history repeating itself!

Last generation manager of managers (MoM) tools ingested events from a patchwork of tools and consoles adding some cursory de-duplication and prioritisation before painting a ‘sea of red’ alerts on their console.

The latest AIOps tooling from Interlink Software is unique in that it integrates with the underlying tools all the way from the data centre to the cloud at three different, but equally important levels:

1) Event and metric level (from your own monitoring tools)

2) Configuration level (the linkages or dependencies between objects in your environment)

3) User interface level (the underlying web interfaces of your existing monitoring tools and apps)

Making real the historically elusive Single Pane of Glass the benefit of this 3-level approach is that you can achieve delivery of consolidated monitoring events and metrics – in context, both in business and technical terms. And when only deep-dive to the native GUIs will do for triage – seamlessly drill down from SPoG view to your underlying tooling.

Grant Glading has approaching 30 years’ experience in systems management gained at Bank of America, MAXM Systems, Boole & Babbage, and BMC Software. Grant leads direct sales, channel partners and marketing efforts for Interlink Software, having successfully sold into and account managed numerous Global 500 customers.