Does your infrastructure suffer from poor availability? Is it performing poorly? How do you ensure your systems remain disease-free? The leading IT doctors at GroundWork have recently identified four diseases that could destroy your organization’s IT performance and availability. Let’s check out the symptoms, diagnosis and cure for each of these.

1. The Four Deadly Diseases
of IT Operations
www.gwos.com

2. Hi! I’m a doctor at GroundWork and I’m here to cure your IT
monitoring ailments. Let’s take a closer look at the four deadly
diseases that are rapidly slowing down IT Operations.

3. Checkitosis Slipped
Disc(overy)
Cloudfluenza Monitoropia
These four culprits
could be behind the
slow performance of
your IT environment.

4. Diagnosis
 Data interpretation takes
too long due to too many
service checks that clog
information
 Strained monitoring
performance
 Dashboards are not
intuitively obvious
Vaccination
 Selectively add new
checks
 Investigate the motives
of anyone who
advocates large number
of checks
Treatment
 Reduce the number of
checks - get to the distill
essence of the problem
 Rank checks from top to
bottom & trim low value
checks
Checkitosis
Too many service checks

5.  Massive network
degradation
 Monitoring solution
performs unthrottled
discovery on all devices
and available metrics
 Not scalable on a larger
network
 Follow up automatic
discovery by thoughtful
culling
 Follow top down
approach to monitoring
 Configure dependencies
to suppress spurious and
derived alarms
 No real cure – like
smoking, don’t start
 Regularly review checks
and remove the worthless
ones
 Reconsider your baseline
number of checks to start
from top five instead of
narrowing a large list.
Diagnosis Vaccination Treatment
Slipped Disc(overy)
Unthrottled Network Scanning

6. Cloudfluenza
Inability to perform
 Performance and
availability issues in
cloud or virtualized
environment
 Supplement Cloud
monitoring with general
purpose tools
 Check performance
measurements before
making changes (to
neighbors)
 Make incremental
changes; measure
(retrofit risk mitigation)
 Identify non-Cloud
contributors to
performance issues
(network, storage, shared
resources)
 Use more than adequate
hardware
 Better CPU shares to
allocate CPU requests
better
Diagnosis Vaccination Treatment

7.  Obsessive hyper focus
on tools and
configuration without
attention to process
improvements
 Keep a run book of what
to do when a failure type
is experience
 Improve and update the
run book regularly
 Create escalation process
 Top down approach -
figure out the why, what
& how of monitoring
 Stop only when all the
problems are solved;
enlist expertise as
needed
Monitoropia
Obsessive focus on
tools and configuration
Diagnosis Vaccination Treatment

8. The GroundWork Hospital wishes you
a fast, healthy and happy network!
Schedule Your Checkup
www.gwos.com/4diseases

9. www.gwos.com