IT Monitoring Scalability Planning: 3 Roadblocks

As IT professionals, planning for growth is something we do all day almost unconsciously. Whether it’s a snippet of code, provisioning the next server, or building out a network design, we’re usually thinking: Will it handle the load? How long until I'll need a newer, faster, or bigger one? How far will this scale?

Despite this almost compulsive concern with scalability, there are still areas of IT where growth tends to be an afterthought. One of these happens to be my area of specialization: IT monitoring. So, I’d like to address growth planning (or non-planning) as it pertains to monitoring by highlighting several mindsets that typically hinder this important, but often surprisingly overlooked element, and showing how to deal with each.

The fire drill mindset
The occurs when something bad has already happened either because there was either no monitoring solution in place or because the existing toolset didn’t scale far enough to detect a critical failure, and so it was missed. Regardless, the result is usually a focus on finding a tool that would have caught the problem that already occurred, and finding it fast.

However, short of a TARDIS, there’s no way to implement an IT monitoring tool that will help avoid a problem after it occurs. Furthermore, moving too quickly as a result of a crisis can mean you don’t take the time to plan for future growth, focusing instead solely on solving the current problem.

My advice is to stop, take a deep breath, and collect yourself. Start by quickly, but intelligently developing a short list of possible tools that will both solve the current problem and scale with your environment as it grows. Next, ask the vendors if they have free (or cheap) licenses for in-house demoing and proofs of concept.

Then, and this is where you should let the emotion surrounding the failure creep back in, get a proof-of-concept environment set up quickly and start testing. Finally, make a smart decision based on all the factors important to you and your environment. (Hint: one of which should always be scalability.) Then implement the tool right away.

The bargain hunter
The next common pitfall that often prevents better growth planning when implementing a monitoring tool is the bargain-hunter mindset. This usually occurs not because of a crisis, but when there is pressure to find the cheapest solution for the current environment.

How do you overcome this mindset? Consider the following scenario: If your child currently wears a size 3 shoe, you absolutely don’t want to buy a size 5 today, right? But you should also recognize that your child is going to grow. So, buying enough size 3 shoes for the next five years is not a good strategy, either.

Also, if financials really are one of the top priorities preventing you from better preparing for future growth, remember that the cheapest time to buy the right-sized solution for your current and future environment is now. Buying a solution for your current environment alone because “that’s all we need” is going to result in your spending more money later for the right-sized solution you will need in the future. (I’m not talking about incrementally more, but start-all-over-again more.)

My suggestion is to use your company’s existing business growth projections to calculate how big of a monitoring solution you need. If your company foresees 10% revenue growth each year over the next three years and then 5% each year after that, and you are willing to consider completely replacing your monitoring solution after five years, then buy a product that can scale to 40% of the size you currently need.

The dollar auction
The dollar auction mindset happens when there is already a tool in place -- a tool that wasn’t cheap and that a lot of time was spent perfecting. The problem is, it’s no longer perfect. It needs to be replaced because company growth has expanded beyond its scalability, but the idea of walking away from everything invested in it is a hard pill to swallow.

Really, this isn’t so much of a mindset that prevents preparing for future growth as it is something that's all too often overlooked as an important lesson: If only you had better planned for future growth the first time around. The reality is that if you’re experiencing this mindset, you need a new solution. However, don’t make the same mistake. This time, take scalability into account.

Whether you’re suffering from one of these mindsets or another that is preventing you from better preparing your IT monitoring for future growth, remember, scalability is key to long term success.