Nearly three-quarters of IT managers think their infrastructure complexity is “high” or “out of control””

Royce Murphy, CEO of IT modelling and data visualisation software company Real Status, has warned that increasing infrastructure complexity is leading to more outages and potential lost business for firms struggling in the recession.

Royce comments: “We know from speaking to IT managers that they often feel they are fighting a losing battle trying to keep on top of all the operations they are responsible for. It often takes far too long to resolve business-impacting outages and slowdowns, and existing IT management tools simply do not support the mix of technologies used in their applications.

“Some applications run on six or more component technologies, and there are different management tools for each technology. As a result, managers are struggling to understand the inter-dependencies and cannot determine which problems are affecting critical systems and which problems are far less important. IT managers also complain that they first hear about performance problems when users call to complain; whereas if they had some method of seeing when problems affected their most important services, they could take proactive steps to address the problems before there was a noticeable effect on the business.

“It is extremely difficult to understand all of the relationships involved in delivering IT services to the business. Applications are broken down into components that are spread across multiple virtual machines and servers, and they rely upon distributed storage and network devices. When heads of different teams meet up to try and solve an application performance issue, it is generally the case that their individual component management dashboards do not understand which components are related to the application in question. Figuring out the inter-dependencies in ad hoc meetings wastes valuable time and costs money.

“The complexity genie is out of the bottle, and firms need to automate recurring tasks, such as understanding the inter-dependencies between all of the components in their infrastructure. The best option for dealing with complexity is to give people a simple and effective way to see the relevant relationships between components and visualise key performance metrics on that model. This approach leverages, rather than replaces, their existing monitoring tools, and it gives the contextual information needed to see which problems are the most important, so they can allocate their resources effectively.

“Hyperglance 2.0 is a modelling and visualisation tool that gives perspective to all the polarised views within existing IT management tools. It weaves all the information together from all your IT resources – asset management, relationship and performance data – into a single 3D model that provides real context on key dependencies”.

Real Status is running a webinar on Thursday, 6 September to demonstrate how Hyperglance 2.0 works and can benefit businesses struggling to keep their infrastructure running effectively.