Top 3 drivers of an application monitoring strategy

There are a plethora of application monitoring tools on the market and a large number of open source solutions to enable monitoring in production.   With all this choice, how does one decide what to implement?   Of course, vendors would have you believe that their solution is the right one in all cases.   Until I join a vendor again :), I will tell you that the right solution for an organization depends on many criteria.  

The top 3 drivers will be

• the near/long term goal for monitoring (what you want to be able to achieve)
• the maturity level of the IT organization (how much you can digest in process enabling technology)
• the existing investment in monitoring tools (whether you just ate lunch and can't justify buying another meal)

Goal
Some IT leaders strongly believe that all you have to do is keep the servers, network and operating systems alive and the applications and end-user experience will follow.   Others believe that you must start by defining Service Level Agreements that translate into measuring end-user experience and then you need to be able to correlate this with infrastucture metrics.  I fall into the second camp, but the right solution for an organization is to the one that will actually be implemented and used.   If there will be no incentive from the top of the organization for measuring end-user experience, then the strategy will drive the solution toward infrastructure only solutions.   If the IT strategy is to progressively improve processes following an ITIL approach, then it will eventually need an integrated Capacity DataBase based on a CMDB and a real time performance management DB.   What is your strategy?

Maturity level
We have been discussing maturity levels of IT organizations for many years.   The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) was first published in 1989.   As it turns out, the first books on ITIL were also published in 1989.   While the two events occuring in the same year is interesting, they were ultimately initiatives to deal with quality and the capability of IT organizations.   The assumption of both initiatives was that until IT organizations were ready to adopt good process, they would not be able to deliver improved quality and predictable throughput.   The ability of an IT organization to effectively implement, care for and use application monitoring, diagnostic drill-down and correlation tools will depend on the level of maturity of the IT organization.  The ability to tightly integrate application monitoring tools and process with ITIL incident and problem management tools and process requires even more maturity.  

Existing investment
As organizations evolve, they always implement some monitoring tools.   Typically, less mature organizations will start by implementing point solutions (database monitoring, network monitoring, server heartbeat monitoring) that are not designed to be integrated.   In many situations, these point solutions will be accompanied by investments in integrated solutions.   I have been involved in many engagements where one of the first goals is to rationalize the investment in tools.   In almost all cases, the right strategy for an IT organization will include some, but definitely not all of the existing investment in monitoring technology.  

Good luck on your monitoring journey and let me know if I can help.