Internal and External Monitoring and Control

Defining what needs to be monitored

The definition of what needs to be monitored is based on understanding the desired outcome of a process, device or system. IT should focus on the service and its impact on the business, rather than just the individual components of technology. The first question that needs to be asked is ‘What are we trying to achieve?’.

At the outset, it will become clear that there are two levels of monitoring:

• Internal Monitoring and Control: Most teams or departments are concerned about being able to execute effectively and efficiently the tasks that have been assigned to them. Therefore, they will monitor the items and activities that are directly under their control. This type of monitoring and control focuses on activities that are self-contained within that team or department. For example, the Service Desk Manager will monitor the volume of calls to determine how many staff need to be available to answer the telephone.
• External Monitoring and Control: Although each team or department is responsible for managing its own area, they do not act independently. Every task that they perform, or device that they manage, has an impact on the success of the organization as a whole. Each team or department will also be controlling items and activities on behalf of other groups, processes or function s. For example, the Server Management team will monitor the CPU performance on key servers and perform workload balancing so that a critical application is able to stay within performance threshold s set by Application Management.

The distinction between Internal and External Monitoring is an important one. If Service Operation focuses only on Internal Monitoring, it will have very well-managed infrastructure, but no way of understanding or influencing the quality of services. If it focuses only on External Monitoring, it will understand how poor the service quality is, but will have no idea what is causing it or how to change it.

In reality, most organizations have a combination of Internal and External Monitoring, but in many cases these are not linked. For example, the Server Management team knows exactly how well the servers are performing and the Service Level Manager knows exactly how the users perceive the quality of service provided by the servers. However, neither of them knows how to link these metric s to define what level of server performance represents good quality service. This becomes even more confusing when server performance that is acceptable in the middle of the month, is not acceptable at month-end.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23