An Open Approach to Enterprise IT Monitoring

Large organizations are spending millions to monitor their plethora of discombobulated systems.  This spend seemed logical pre-Twitter when we didn’t really understand the power of combining a simple 140 character message with an open API. However, now is a great time for IT companies to rethink their enterprise and closed approached to monitoring.

With the advent of social media both on the Internet and internal to many organizations, we are becoming more accustom to sharing information. Twitter is leading the way with “system” like updates for people.  Ever so often a person will send a notification to their followers or stakeholders about their life.  The status is usually as insignificant as, “I’m at Starbucks.”  However, it could be as critical as the need of the person.  While the individual can protect their status updates to approved followers, most Twitter users update in an unprotected state.  However, only the people following them see their notification unless an active search is performed.

So, let’s move IT forward and adopt a similar solution to the status of our IT systems.  Let’s get more efficient by allowing anyone that chooses to follow a system to know the status of that system.  They system may heartbeat a healthy status, or may just update it’s status when it’s having issues.  Either way those concerned have the option to know.  Likewise, one IT analyst writing up an extensive timeline becomes antiquated.  The IT team can focus on resolution and the business can begin working on contingencies.

How do we make the transition from a closed proprietary solution to an open approach to monitoring?  Well believe it or not the intermediary solution would be to continue using your enterprise solution.  However, instead of directing those many messages to individuals you redirect them to an API.  If you truly don’t care who knows the status of your system one could leverage the Twitter API and send the status directly to a Twitter account established for each system. Realizing that most IT organizations may not want to be that transparent, I would suggest the open source micro-blogging platform Status.net. Simply download and install the open source Status.net code and begin the message integration with the Status.net API.  Next notify the stakeholders and encourage them to create an account on the micro-blogging platform you have chosen and encourage them to follow the status updates of their system.

Long-term systems could be enhanced to communicate directly with Twitter or a Status.net instance, and the expensive and costly enterprise monitoring system can be phased out.  In the not so distant future innovative software companies will soon begin offering monitoring solutions that integrate into the open platforms like Twitter and Status.net.  I’ve personally developed a couple of web solutions that occasionally and automatically update Twitter.  If the process to make this happen wasn’t so easy, I would be a skeptic of this open approach to monitoring.  However, the integration is easy and people’s behavior and adoption of social media at home and in the work place is rapidly changing.

What are you waiting for?  Start thinking of ways you can integrate to Twitter or a Status.net instance and let the information flow to those that care about your systems.

Image Source: http://status.net