In an economy where organizations are trying to cut operational costs and maximize current IT infrastructures, dashboards may prove to be the most insightful of technology investments. Many organizations find that a centralized dashboard can pinpoint underutilized legacy systems and processes – assets that could be redistributed and used with a renewed purpose without major technology investment. Across all industries, the companies that remain resilient during thorny economic times are those that continue to derive value from previous investments do so by devoting support to solutions that can optimize the performance of existing assets and systems.
In a car, the dashboard is the home of information. At a glance, the driver can tell the speed, distance traveled, fuel level, engine temperature – in essence, everything needed to keep moving and make it to the destination on time and on budget.
Dashboards in IT are essentially the same – a one-stop place to find all the information necessary to keep the organization up and running. At its most basic level, a dashboard showcases general system health and performance. By successfully pulling important information from throughout the infrastructure, dashboards provide at-a-glance status updates on the overall health of technology assets to keep the company running smoothly.
Get Smart: Proactive Dashboards Cross Borders
Dashboard technology pulls data from sources throughout the organization and compiles it into a single user-friendly interface. “Smart” dashboards take this premise a step further by correlating data received from different sources in order to predict system problems and recognize impact on the overall business. These next-generation tools allow companies to take a proactive stance on managing assets, promoting the overall customer experience and protecting the business’s bottom line.
For instance, the CTO of ReallyCoolTravelWebsite will be notified on Monday night that, due to a helpdesk ticket that will take a server offline on Tuesday morning, projected site traffic during that time will overtax the remaining servers. The warning will alert him to possible site downtime and the overall potential revenues lost during that time. He’ll also be able to see – in real time – that his trusted IT administrator was also notified, and steps were taken to redistribute traffic before the overload occurred. The result: customers to the site saw no change in transaction time, revenues stayed on track and the IT department brought recognizable and measurable value to the business – thanks to a “smart” dashboard’s ability to take data from one system and apply it to correctly extrapolate an end result in a different system.
Dashboard Roadmap: Custom Builds for Business Success
Does your company run like a minivan or a Porsche? Either way, the organization needs dashboard technology that is a custom fit, showing all the key indicators and metrics that are important in keeping your organization rolling on even the rockiest road. With this in mind, consider the following strategies to implement when contemplating real-time information delivery to build a dashboard that showcases the metrics you need, when you need them.
- Move beyond "old ways" of thinking: Conventional monitoring tools require manual thresholds, rules and scripts. These methods rely on baselines by determining “normal” within a constantly changing environment. This approach consistently fails because the information varies from day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month, as new users are added, new services deployed or procedures changed. With the shifting of normal behavior on each of hundreds - if not thousands - of systems within the data center, it becomes humanly impossible to determine baselines for any given point in time. Accept that there is no “normal” and shake off the shackles of rules, scripts and thresholds driving data to your dashboard.
- Implement "smart" technology: Analytics and automation are important tools within the dynamic IT environment – you can’t possibly keep track of all of the constantly changing components and events that affect the quality of service and the user experience. Rather than trying to model constantly changing performance variables, advanced monitoring technology analyzes behavior in real-time and correlates infrastructure performance to discover trends and patterns. Dashboards based on these self-learning tools facilitate predictive incident resolution, adaption to constantly changing IT environments, and an overall increase in operational efficiency.
