What does it take to build a next generation operations center?   I recently had a long chat with an old colleague about what things operations should being doing to “take that next step” and “getting out of firefighting mode”.    Operations is obviously subservient to the business, but when the business asks for an increase is service assurance quality, how can it be delivered?  An even better question is how can we classify the successful operations organizations from the unsuccessful ones?   The discussion helped to break this into three stages of what I call “operational maturity”: being reactive, being proactive, and then being experts.

The first stage is being reactive, which I would call absolutely necessary.   You cannot become an expert until you can track outages from a real-time and historical point of view.   Checking the availability of the technology you are supporting so that when it goes down, operations can respond before the customers call in.   Without this initial first stage, operations has devolved to a help desk or call center function.   I think the majority of operations center still have not accomplished nailing this one down and many have  even overlooked its importance.

The second stage is being proactive, which is attempting to prevent outages from occurring.   This does not replace being reactive, since you will never catch every outage before it happens.  Polling for load/usage statistics (CPU, Disk, Memory, Bandwidth) is a great start, but you also need fault collection (some technology warns you when it’s about to fail) as well as standard operating procedures and operational performance monitoring.   Most operations centers think they are this level, but very few are.   The easy litmus test is asking the following question: How many outages did we have last week and how many did we prevent last week?   If you cannot answer the first part, you have not advanced to the reactive stage, and if you did or cannot answer the second question then you are still not being proactive.

The third stage is being what I call the experts.   That means you can eliminate simple issues that evolve into problems that eventually evolve into outages.   Doing things like configuration/change management, capacity management, knowledge management, high level correlation and automatic remediation allows you to address the miniscule before it ruins your day.   I do not know any operations center that has made it to this level yet.

So with all that being said, where is your operations center?  If you don’t know, then ask yourself one question:  Which problems do you spend all your time on — outages, problems, or issues?

Look for a future white paper on this subject.  I think this kind of information is valuable when deciding what is important for operations.

If you are interested, take a gander at some of our white papers.

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