Information for Technical Professionals

We understand that keeping critical applications and services running smoothly in today’s enterprise environments is no simple undertaking.

It has become so complex and resource dependent that it’s increasingly harder for you and your team to be proactive and avoid service outages and degradations that could have been prevented. You’ve almost certainly relied on real-time monitoring tools to alert you of issues – but have you asked why is it that they don’t seem to make your job any easier? It’s probably down to one of these very common issues:

• An overwhelming amount of data makes it difficult for your team to decipher the important issues from the noise.
• Patchy tool coverage providing limited visibility into individual infrastructure silos, with no holistic visibility of end-to-end services.
• Relying on real-time monitoring in isolation – real-time monitoring and management tools can inundate you with alerts and don’t provide the basis for real proactivity with early visibility of emerging trends and patterns as they build ahead of time.
• Relying on thresholds and triggers such as CPU utilisation which give a misleading picture of performance and does not cover all service performance factors such as the application itself, network or middleware failing to scale.
• Your team is already stretched just running the day-to-day business – there’s little time for proactive analysis such as capacity planning.

Service Delivery Analytics – we deliver the insight that really matters

We know that to deliver optimised services that the business demands, you need complete end-to-end visibility of your IT services’ performance and capacity. We specialise in delivering the insight that helps you to achieve this – removing the noise and giving you the facts you need to take proactive control of your estate. And it’s all done in a way that’s quite different to traditional approaches.

A service, not software

Our IT Analytics service is a unique combination of data-driven analytics and human analyst expertise, so we uncover insight that no software alone can provide. Our service is delivered as a monthly subscription meaning no upfront investment or complex installation. Instead, because we are permanently plugged into your environment, our service can respond rapidly to your environment and easily accommodate new analysis requests as and when your needs change.

Complements your existing processes, skills and tools

We don’t ask that you rip out your existing monitoring tools or processes. In fact, our service goes hand-in-hand with the skills and tools you already have in place – by providing one-stop insight that unifies and complements your current monitoring, ITIL processes and service performance strategy.

Joins the dots – for complete end-to-end visibility

We build and model a complete end-to-end view of your services, mapping and correlating data from each part of the service infrastructure.

We show you what normal looks like

We model and baseline your service to show you what your service looks like when it is performing normally. So unlike threshold and trigger monitoring our service enables us to identify deviations and emerging trends early – giving you valuable time to take preventative action.

Identifies changes and trends for proactive action

Our service supplies both short and long-term insight for service performance optimisation and capacity planning. Preventable outages and degradations are typically caused by more than one single point of failure. If a deviation in normal performance occurs, our service saves your team valuable time by pin-pointing the most probable root causes for your team to focus on, saving valuable time on investigation and problem resolution.

Our IT Analytics approach follows a very different model to traditional ways of managing IT service performance and capacity.

We deal with the complexity to give you the management insight you need, so you can focus on driving action that makes a real impact on the business

Here’s how our service works

We capture infrastructure-generated data from your IT environment

Our service takes advantage of the data that already exists in your IT service environment and that usually gets discarded. We typically capture 3-6 data sources per application/service* and transfer the data off-site to our secure data warehouse. Our pragmatic approach means we capture data in whatever format you have it in, so there’s no need to deploy new probes or agents. From its raw form we transform it into the format needed for our end-to-end service modelling and analysis.

Cutting-edge data modelling

By modelling and aggregating the performance of the underlying infrastructure components which comprise the service, we establish a profile of what the service looks like when it is behaving normally. We then run Analysers against these data-rich models to identify when normal performance parameters are approaching levels that require attention.

We add essential expert interpretation

Our dedicated team of analysts, which include domain experts, business analysts, statisticians, mathematical modellers and economists, analyse and interpret the data to identify performance hotspots, capacity bottlenecks, root causes of performance degradation, downstream impact of capacity changes and other key contributors to overall service optimisation. Unlike real-time monitoring threshold alerting, our analysts intelligently extract the insight that counts, saving you valuable time and effort.

Insight you need – independent and to the point

Our service is highly-personalised and fully independent, so you get the insight you need delivered in a way that works for you. This takes a variety of forms from direct dialogue with our analysts, management-ready reporting to our tailored Web portal, which provides a rich variety of executive information, dashboards and chart centre views.

Sumerian IT Analytics deliver IT services management success to leading UK bank, HBOS

Sumerian delivered a solution for HBOS that provides analysis and visibility of end-to-end system performance for a number of HBOS' key business services and applications.

Download the full case study