Is your IT cockpit ready?

WHAT IS A COCKPIT?

Among medical, aviation and finance, key industries which affect mankind directly either for life or monetary reasons, aviation has been a front-runner in developing fail-proof technologies using combination of people, processes and technology (ITIL!).

The most visible example of this technological prowess is the aircraft cockpit. A cockpit is a state of the art cabin or flight control area from where the pilot controls the aircraft with the aid of real time indicators and heavily automated instruments.

Modern day cockpits are well-equipped with many monitoring technologies. By combining these with training procedures and standards aviation accidents have become famously rare, and the business turnover for airlines has soared.

NEED FOR AN IT COCKPIT

The way technology improvements in aviation have enabled greatly improved travel, Information Technology (IT) has been the key enabler in stock exchanges, banks, payments and regulatory mechanisms in the finance industry.

Thus, it is important that IT teams managing these systems are equipped with their own IT cockpit which helps to provide an overview as well as, when required, a detailed drill-down into the availability and performance of the IT systems they support. Additionally, an overview into organizational summary health and each system’s contribution in the summary will be beneficial.

CONSTITUENTS OF AN IT COCKPIT

The various components enabling an IT cockpit are:

Single pane of glass dashboard providing Availability and Performance status.
Single source of truth for all IT Metrics.
Visibility into detailed metrics at a click for complete IT estate (Hardware, Network, Application and Business).
Summary level visibility into other upstream/downstream departments or systems.
Automated actions for incident investigation and troubleshooting.
Physical seating together of all teams wherever possible helps in quicker co-ordinations and to act as One Operations.
Communication: direct access to subject matter experts and stakeholders.
Known errors and Standard Operating procedures incorporated into the monitoring tool itself.
Integration with ticketing, sound alarms, notifications, data ware house and other existing tools.

BENEFITS

Key benefits derived from concepts of Crew resource management (CRM) that are applicable to IT as well are:

Information Processing
Improving Reliability and Incident management
Workload management
Situational awareness
Communication & management
Automation

CHALLENGES IN SETTING UP COCKPIT

Yes, organizations do face challenges in setting up their own IT Cockpits. Some of which are :

Lack of Foresight & Vision to envision the IT estate as one business.
One tool that can monitor infrastructure & application, availability & performance in real-time.
Tool with the lowest possible foot-print on critical financial infrastructure but still have the highest possible coverage.
Reluctance of teams to share their availability information with other teams or departments.

GENEOS FOR COCKPIT DASHBOARDS

Geneos has been successfully deployed at over 180 installations including stock exchanges and 9 out of 10 leading investment banks to monitor in real-time, the IT availability and performance. Our experience shows that Geneos has been a natural fit in mission critical real-time monitoring space and has helped IT Ops run business smoothly, avoid down-times and in times of issues, helped the IT Ops team decisively analyze the root-cause and take corrective action.