Most IT organizations like to think of themselves as continuously improving. The best ones constantly invest in building new skills, deploying new infrastructure, acquiring new tools, creating new processes, or even tuning what they already have in order to wring more efficiency and productivity out of their environments. Many are migrating to the cloud, as cloud service providers (or CSPs) cheerily advertise three, four or even five 9s of availability (e.g., 99.999% uptime).

Growing up in Seattle, Washington, I had access to some of the best hiking in the world. If you want take on a challenge and climb a peak, then the Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges provide a variety of journeys for everyone regardless of skill level and starting point. We were taught at a very young age that everyone needed certain “essentials” before setting out to ensure safety and success.

Modern IT environments can be dynamic and complex. IT organizations often find themselves monitoring effectively at small scale but few have implemented solutions with the flexibility and capability to operate in elastically scalable environments.

Service-centric IT organizations differentiate themselves from peers by their ability to accelerate incident resolution no matter what the organization’s priorities may be as they undertake critical transformation projects.

Network performance monitoring and diagnostics (commonly referred to as NPM or NPMD) tools are valuable for IT Ops teams that want to maintain visibility into the health and performance of their networking infrastructure. They provide this visibility in two major ways: by retrieving diagnostic data from network infrastructure components (such as routers and switches) and by analyzing network traffic flow and quality of service through various techniques (such as deep packet inspection).

Today’s IT infrastructure environments are extremely complex. Given the dynamic nature of IT, where relationships between services and IT infrastructure are constantly changing, proactively preventing impacts to critical business services is never easy.

Two of the biggest IT headaches we hear about here at Zenoss are alert noise and fatigue. To help combat these, we co-developed an integration with PagerDuty to help enterprises successfully overcome these pain points. Recently, we launched the updated version of the PagerDuty ZenPack using PagerDuty’s v2 API and certification for Zenoss Cloud.

The cost of unexpected downtime is rising. IT Ops teams need an IT service assurance model that allows them to see everything happening in their infrastructures through data collection, processing that data to determine service health, and integrating with other ITOM systems to accelerate incident resolution.