The one skill every IT pro needs

Only one thing can turn the tables on the angst that comes with continuous integration and delivery of ITaaS.

Given the numerous and growing possibilities offered by cloud, data and more connected devices, you can understand the many reactions IT pros have, including sheer panic. The broad adoption of IT-as-a-service (ITaaS) has put the onus squarely on those professionals more than ever. Add to this the technology debt — such as multiple layers of legacy infrastructure with their associated processes — and technology inertia from the ground floor of the data centre to the executive suite, as well as the dollars already invested into people, process and technology.

As a result, IT pros might be excused for sticking their heads in the sand and following the same well-trodden path of doing more with less, while blindly integrating more variables into the data centre ecosystem. This is a recipe for disaster.

Fortunately, there is a more productive alternative, based on a singular skill that can turn the tables on the angst that comes with continuous integration and delivery of ITaaS. And that’s monitoring as a discipline.

Fundamentally sound is cool

IT monitoring is generally considered a pretty low-level, unglamorous skill. Most IT pros got their start in IT monitoring systems — in other words, in a role where they couldn’t break anything. The value-add differentiator is when it’s done as a discipline.

Today’s hybrid IT environments give monitoring as a discipline new significance. As ITaaS continues its march from hype to reality, IT pros are responsible for the quality and responsiveness of end-to-end services. And often, they don’t have as much direct control over the underlying infrastructure services. Public cloud services are a great example, where those pros have relatively little influence over availability of the underlying cloud infrastructure. So when an outage occurs, guess who’s in the hot seat?

Monitoring as a discipline allows IT pros to manage quality of service, even for hybrid IT environments, where cloud service level agreements fall outside their purview. It is also fundamentally agnostic — it can be applied as a methodology to any technology, system, network, endpoint or vendor service that’s integrated and delivered into the organisation.

Enterprise mobility and BYOD, for example, typically cause grief and angst because of the variety and permutations of devices, software, customisations, updates and identity access management. However, pare back the layers and all you have are more devices connected to your network. The same fundamental monitoring principles and security protocols apply to smart devices and the Internet of Things as they do to standard corporate networks.

Monitoring as a discipline is a set of skills that all IT pros should already have in some shape or form on their CVs. While additional disciplines such as service-orientated architecture and application migration will come in useful for addressing specific challenges, they won’t have a practical impact if IT can’t integrate and deliver infrastructure while root-causing and remediating problems in real time. Monitoring with discipline should already be core to any IT professional’s work. As hybrid IT makes infrastructure environments more complex, with new people, processes and technologies, monitoring as a discipline becomes critical to enabling successful business outcomes.

Keep DART and SOAR on

What makes an effective monitoring-with-discipline strategy? When facing the complexity and highly elastic and dynamic workloads and services of hybrid IT, technology professionals need to focus on the fundamentals of two interlinked skills frameworks — DART and SOAR. With DART, the focus is on building a solid foundation to quickly surface the single point of truth in a sea of unknowns and silos:

1. Discovery: Let me see what’s going on.
2. Alerting: Let me know when something is about to break or broken.
3. Remediation: Let me fix it fast and bring services back online.
4. Troubleshooting: Let me root-cause the problem to find a solution that can be turned into a best practice.

After gaining seasoning and experience with the DART framework, it’s time to expand into new IT frontiers and truly SOAR.

1. Security: Don’t get breached.
2. Optimisation: Do more with less efficiently and effectively.
3. Automation: Scale IT.
4. Reporting: Present IT and executive leadership teams with what they need to make decisions.

Combining these two frameworks is the most effective means to bridge into hybrid IT with its IoT, clouds and endless devices. These are skills that pros should have been using all their working lives. In the world of hybrid IT, the DART/SOAR approach can help them tackle some of the top challenges that extend beyond technical constructs, since these skills frameworks enable a person to adapt to continuous integration and delivery of any services.

Monitoring as a discipline shouldn’t be the only skill pros have on their CV. They need to cultivate new, complementary competencies. Knowing how to consume APIs allows for seamless integration of multiple services, making for easier automation and optimisation. And vendor management skills are extremely important when it comes to ensuring that quality of service from providers meets service level agreements and terms and conditions.

Image courtesy Mr Seb under CC BY-ND 2.0