What is digitalization?

According to Gartner, “digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities. It is the process of moving to a digital business.” This includes evolving existing products more quickly, and being more agile in bringing new products to market.

At a greater level of detail, digitalization means that the enterprise implements its critical business processes in software. These include:

• Marketing to prospective customers
• Engaging with existing customers
• Managing the relationships with suppliers
• Managing the entire production to fulfillment process
• Managing the relationships with partners
• Managing the relationships with employees and contractors

It is also clear from the Gartner research that CEO’s expect digitalization to drive growth in sales and profits and that they expect their technology management teams (IT) and technology leadership teams (the CIO and his staff) to successfully lead and implement the technology initiatives that will deliver these benefits from digitalization.

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An overview of events

The essence of IT Operations Management for the last 30 years (ever since the advent of distributed systems in the mid 1980’s) has been to understand what is “normal” and what is “abnormal” and to then alert on the anomalies. Events are anomalies.

Now events come from an incredible variety of sources. Every element of the entire stack (disks, storage arrays, network devices, servers, load balancers, firewalls, systems software, middleware and services and applications) are capable of sending events.

Events tend to come in two broad forms. Hard faults and alarms related to failures in the environment (this disk drive has failed, this port on this switch has failed, this database server is down), and alerts that come from violations of thresholds set by humans on various monitoring systems.

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Why did VMware acquire Wavefront? The start of the answer to this question comes with an understanding of what Wavefront is (or was). Wavefront was started by former Google engineers who set out to build a monitoring system for the commercial market that had the same features and benefits as the monitoring system that Google had built for itself.

Due to the massive scale of Google, such a system would have to have two key attributes:

1. The ability to consume and process massive amounts of data very quickly. In fact, the Wavefront website make the claim, "Enterprise-grade cloud monitoring and analytics at over 1 million data points per second."
2. The ability to quickly find what you want in this massive ocean of data

So, it is clear that the folks at Wavefront viewed modern monitoring to be a big data problem, and it is clear that some people at VMware were willing to pay a fair amount of money for a monitoring system that took a real-time and highly scalable approach to monitoring.

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Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) outage on Feb. 28 took down many well-known websites and web services. For the complete post-mortem from Amazon Web Services (AWS), read this lengthy explanation of what went wrong and what AWS is doing to address the issue.

If the full explanation too long and too complicated, here is a short version:

• An administrator was going to perform maintenance on a set of S3 servers.
• He mis-typed the command to take a set of servers offline, and more servers than intended were taken off line
• This took the entire S3 environment in the U.S. East Zone closer to the edge in capacity than the system was designed for and caused widespread availability issues in web services that relied upon the S3 environment. 

More instructive and more worrisome are the steps Amazon took to prevent this issue from happening again:

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IT operations is under a set of conflicting mandates and pressures.

The business wants IT operations to be more agile and to be a partner in the process of bringing more business functionality online (also knows as digitization).

The executives in charge of IT (most often the CIO) want IT operations to be more cost effective, which means spending either needs to be reduced or not grow as quickly as it has in the past.

Application owners want two inherent conflicting objectives. They want IT operations to guarantee that their infrastructure will provide excellent performance for their applications, and they simultaneously want IT operations to feel more like a cloud provider with a rich set of self-service options.

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Why do we monitor things (user experience, transactions, applications, virtual servers, physical servers, datastores, etc.)? Because we want them to work well all of the time.

Does everything in your environment work well as you expect it to all of the time?

Well, of course not. What if we reinvent monitoring so that we can help make that happen?

Consider the following analogy: An airplane can fly itself from its origination to its destination and land itself without human intervention. If we flew commercial airliners the way we run enterprise IT, planes would be dropping out of the sky left and right—and only be 30 percent full (maybe this would be a good thing).

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