Digital. Innovative, groundbreaking insights. Discovering new business opportunities. That is what often comes to mind when thinking of data. To a certain extent this is true – data can indeed be used to uncover interesting opportunities you have not thought of before. However, the benefits of using data can also be found closer to home. For instance, when it comes to optimizing your IT environment and gaining insights into its performance regarding costs, efficiency, and security. It can be challenging to stay in control and safeguard optimal performance. How can we use data for this?

In control of IT – using all data you can get your “hands on”

At Itility we manage quite some IT environments. Our passion is to automate everything away, and to use analytics to work smarter and stay in control. Staying in control of our IT environment requires collecting data from multiple sources, combining them, and using statistics, machine learning, and algorithms to generate useful insights

In a typical IT environment, you will find physical servers, storage, virtual machines, network devices, databases, applications, and so on. All these systems collect their own data in the form of logs and metrics. And since these systems are interconnected, correlations exist among them. For example: a lack of storage can cause deteriorated application performance, which can have a business impact for business-critical applications. Combining multiple data sources helps in quickly finding the root cause of such an issue.

To provide opportunities for analysis, all this data needs to be stored into a data lake. Consider, for example, the application that crashed due to a lack of storage. Instead of having to dive into this multifaceted problem manually, we have a monitoring solution in place that generates automated alerts based on the multiple occurring events: the lack of storage, an unresponsive virtual machine, and degraded application performance. It then decides to automatically contact one of our DevOps engineers to solve the issue. This is still a ‘responsive’ or reactive way-of-working, but that is often the starting point.