The End of Dashboards: Complex IT Environments Require Smarter Solutions
Is it time to bid farewell to traditional dashboards? Learn how to build success in today’s complex IT environment.
As IT environments grow in complexity, companies are replacing dashboards with automated runbooks that leverage the experience of experts. Adam Hert, director product management, SaaS/analytics, at Riverbed Technology, discusses how this shift allows junior IT staff to handle routine tasks, freeing senior leaders to focus on running the business.
Recent years have brought an acceleration of digital transformation fueled by companies relying on cloud-based applications and workers moving into home offices as working from home shifted from an occasional perk to a necessity. The complexity of managing these expanding networks and endpoints has made the lives of IT staff more challenging and put those skills in high demand.
Companies have responded to this challenge in myriad ways, not the least of which is creating newer and more extensive dashboards that help IT staff monitor the health of the networks under their command. But dashboards are far from a perfect solution and come with their own unique set of challenges. IT environments are so complex that it is difficult to determine how to build a dashboard. What data do you need to monitor? What preset limits do you want to measure? What is the impact of an anomaly on the business? How do you prioritize alerts? It is very easy to get that wrong, and the consequences could result in network downtime at the wrong time.
Not only is there a challenge regarding what to put on the dashboard, but there is a larger question about who is responsible for monitoring the dashboard. Under constant pressure to put out fires across the IT landscape, skilled technicians do not have the time to monitor the dashboard constantly.
As a result of the complicated nature of customizing dashboards and finding the resources to monitor one, we could be looking at the end of the usefulness of dashboards. What will take the place of dashboards? Advances in automation and contextual alerts may help IT teams move away from dashboards monitoring organizations’ health to tools that automate remediation. This movement to automation has knock-on effects for the organization, freeing up staff from putting out unexpected fires and enabling them to focus on the strategic challenge of building a better network that helps their companies drive innovation that leads to bottom-line results.
The Limitations of Dashboards
Effective dashboards provide real-time data that help IT teams monitor the health of a network, help IT uncover trends over time that could negatively impact the organization, and speed decision-making. Well-designed dashboards give IT teams a high-level view of key metrics and drill down into underlying data to gain a more granular view of a given problem. For dashboards to be effective, the data in a dashboard needs to be delivered in near real-time and be relevant to the end user.
Creating an effective dashboard in today’s complex IT environment is incredibly complicated because every company has its own specific IT environment, which means dashboards need to be highly customized. Part of that customization is knowing who the end user is going to be. Is that dashboard being developed for a junior-level staffer with limited troubleshooting experience or for a senior-level guru? Packing a lot of information into a dashboard that a senior leader could easily interpret might overwhelm a junior staffer who would not know how to prioritize alerts. In general, dashboards need to be designed for junior staffers because senior leaders don’t have the time to monitor dashboards. Having a senior leader affixed to a dashboard is a waste of resources.
Even dedicating junior staff to monitor dashboards is problematic for most companies. We are currently in an IT staffing crunch. Already small IT teams do not have the resources to have somebody stare at a dashboard.
See More: Full Automation Is a Near-impossible Goal: Here’s What to Strive for Instead
Automation Is Key
The skill sets needed to interpret the data in a dashboard are becoming increasingly scarce as baby boomers retire. Simply put, there are fewer and fewer kinds of experts in the organization who can look at a dashboard, read the tea leaves, and understand what is broken. Companies are reacting to that crisis through automation. They have created runbooks that automate repetitive processes by leveraging the experience of experts.
The flight deck of an airplane with knobs, switches, and digital displays is a wonderful dashboard. Yet, sometimes a plane unexpectedly runs into turbulence that its dashboards cannot detect. In those instances, a pilot may decide to climb to find less choppy skies, relying on a joystick that is mostly automated fly-by-wire technology, essentially a runbook of information developed by experts that relies on computers to guide the pilot to clear skies.
The working equivalent of turbulence in technology is that sometimes corporate IT dashboards fail to recognize a problem. Or they identify a problem, but then the dashboard reader needs to know how to rectify the problem, and that person may be working from a limited skill set. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have not only improved the quality of dashboards, but they have also enabled organizations to create automated workflows based on the expert opinions of people within their organizations. Instead of having a junior staffer dedicated to monitoring a dashboard and then calling a senior guru to fix common problems, automation can replicate the guru’s experience.
This shift to automated runbooks is a win-win-win for the organization. In many cases, automated runbooks free junior staffers from being chained to a dashboard and the tedious work of performing the required repetitive tasks to defuse small ticking time bombs. Senior IT leaders can focus on their organization’s challenges without being distracted by having to provide guidance to the more junior members of their team for recurrent but infrequent network problems.
Companies actually get two victories here. By automating tedious tasks and enabling junior staffers to resolve problems at the lowest level, the IT teams are happy because they get to focus on the technology challenges that drew them to the field, not the basic maintenance work of keeping the engine running. Additionally, automation helps keep IT teams small at a time when finding talented staff can be as difficult as spotting a Snowy Owl in a blizzard.
Embracing Complexity
When designed and used effectively, dashboards can be used to gain insights into network health and reliability. Ideally, companies should be able to set up dashboards that IT teams can use to put out brush fires before corporate call centers are burning with irate customers. In practice, creating dashboards poses a host of trade-offs that often don’t provide enough information or context for IT teams to proactively identify warning signs or remediate problems.
As IT infrastructure gets increasingly more complex, the number of IT workers managing that complexity hasn’t changed. But the skill set required to manage infrastructure has increased with the complexity of the network. The pain point of managing the growing complexity with the same limited human resources can only be addressed through automation. Automation allows lower-level IT people to access the brainpower of IT leaders, who can then keep their focus on strategic business initiatives that drive bottom-line revenue. As the complexity of managing networks increases, companies will increasingly rely on automation to keep the network humming and drive innovation.
Are you doing away with traditional dashboards? How are you enabling your IT team? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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