The highways are a mess at this time of year. Yes, it’s winter in the Rockies, and Television and the Internet are providing a steady flow of updates about the weather, even as vehicle’s info/entertainment centers highlight changed traffic conditions. So much information coming so quickly, it’s not easy to process it all when battling traffic. Do I exit this freeway or should I stick with it? Should I stay south or perhaps turn west?
Facing such a flood of information is not only confusing, but just as likely, distracting and operating a vehicle in inclement weather isn’t helped when drivers are trying to process all the information coming their way. In the realtime world, and driving is a good example of the demands that come with living in a realtime motoring world, timely information remains important, but all too often it’s just streams of data where a single missed item can lead a driver astray. It takes very little to turn a minor mishap into a deadly encounter.
The IT world of hybrid computers, clouds, and meeting SLA’s demands realtime.
In the realtime IT world systems, platforms, operating systems, middleware and applications are all providing updates about their operational status. A constant barrage of data makes tracking the performance of an application difficult; who can tell whether basic SLA metrics are being met? Add into this the added complexity that comes with hybrid computers, not to mention the use of clouds and the task befalling those responsible for ensuring customers are being served in a timely manner appears more like black magic than pure science. There’s nothing that changes a customer’s experience faster than misinformation, or worse, no information at all.
There’s no escaping the reality that whenever the subject of hybrids is raised, at a minimum there will be two of everything. Correlating, and then responding when required, has just moved everyone in IT further up the complexity curve. Each processor will have system logs of one type or another, application logs, database logs and so on – but in the end, they will need to conform to SLAs and that’s when the difficulties arise. And in the realtime IT world, where hybrids exist, there’s a real need for business users and company analysts to leverage the capabilities of essentially self-service products like WebAction.
In a November, 2014 report Data Preparation Is Not an Afterthought, Gartner analysts note that companies’ leadership needs to “Use self-service interactive data preparation tools to enhance analyst productivity.” Furthermore, according to Gartner, these leaders should “Introduce data preparation techniques that assess and improve the quality of data from new and diverse data sources.” In a subsequent Novemebr 2014 report of Gartner’s take on what companies can expect to see appearing on the BI landscape, Predicts 2015: Power Shift in Business Intelligence and Analytics Will Fuel Disruption, other analysts noted that it’s important to, “Evaluate new product offerings in self-service data preparation and smart data discovery against the road map of your current BI platform vendor to determine whether an integrated or best-of-breed approach will best meet future needs”.
Realtime process monitoring, alerting, and workflow enablement with NonStop
For the NonStop community, the emergence of hybrid computers based on NonStop X and Linux X Zeon blades will require self-service products like WebAction to better ensure SLAs are being met. WebAction is well suited to the task of SLA monitoring all that Gartner describes – being able to consume multiple streams is a fundamental strength of WebAction. When it comes to “realtime process monitoring, alerting, and workflow enablement across hybrid systems including NonStop X and Linux X hybrids,” said WebAction Cofounder and EVP, Sami Akbay, “This is just one area where WebAction excels. We see this service as part of the future landscape for all enterprise systems.”
In winter our highways may be a mess and traversing a city blanketed in snow is a trying experience. However, in the realtime IT world, this doesn’t have to be the case and the ever-growing streams of data being produced from within the data center prove easy for WebAction to consume – there’s little reason why anyone should be left uninformed about the experiences being enjoyed by their customers. None whatsoever – and it only takes one instance for customers to jump to the competition, and that’s not an experience any CIO wants to have!
