FEATURE
AUTONOMOUS
VEHICLES ARE
A HOT TOPIC
AND THE SAME
WILL BE TRUE IN
NETWORKING.
outside world can push you
into day two if you won’t or
‘The
can’t embrace powerful trends
quickly. If you fight them, you’re probably
fighting the future. Embrace them and you
have a tailwind.’ – Jeff Bezos.
When you are driving a car, do you watch
the road ahead, or the dashboard? The
answer is that you watch both, of course.
But you watch them in a different way.
The dashboard supplies numeric data,
including historic data – how many
miles you have travelled – and current
data about things like your speed, fuel
levels and engine revs. All of these are
useful. Some are critical, but taken for
granted: few people bother with engine
temperature unless a warning light
flashes. But none of them are particularly
relevant to the driver’s intention.
The intention is typically to reach a
destination, rather than to drive at 60
mph and keep the engine at the right
temperature. (Though traffic police do
hope that a part of the intention is not to
exceed speed limits).
Watching the road ahead is much more
closely aligned to intention. We are
looking for familiar landmarks, road signs
indicating where to turn off, information
suggesting how many miles to go.
But we are even more alert to one
overarching but unannounced intention:
not to crash. Any obstacle, person or
vehicle is suddenly in the way and we will
instinctively swerve, brake or accelerate
to avoid it.
The interesting thing is that these
responses are largely automatic – they
happen before we even have time to
think. Very different from the slower way
we respond to the dashboard. ‘Going 55
in a 40 mph zone – I’d better slow down a
bit’. ‘Gas low – better keep my eyes open
for a fuel station’.
Driving operations
So, how do we compare driving cars and
driving business operations?
Operation teams are typically notified
of performance or availability issues
after they’ve occurred. It is important
to know that last quarter was down
5% on the previous quarter, but the
damage has already been done. We
need visibility into what is happening
now – so we drive by the dashboard,
monitoring systems to ensure they’re
within acceptable thresholds. After over
20 years of monitoring best practices to
respond to outages and events, we are
biased towards reducing outages and
problems, rather than having our eyes on
the road ahead and focusing on actual
business objectives.
Staring at dashboards, likely designed
years ago under different circumstances,
is not an effective way to manage
and debug an operation. Dashboards
introduce a passive approach to
consuming data that someone decided
was useful from a previous problem. We
use this data to look for clues or danger
signs rather than looking ahead to make
sure that the network is meeting business
objectives. Operators would do better to
monitor the network proactively to ensure
that it is meeting the business needs.
Organisations are embarking on
complex initiatives that include cloud,
Edge and cloud-native application
deployments. As a result, operational
teams have to support very complex and
dynamically evolving projects. In the past,
organisations added to their existing
monitoring tools and processes another
monitoring solution, or dashboard, for
each new initiative. Typically, the vendor
suggests the monitoring tools for their
particular solution.
In this way, the operation team builds
up an ever more elaborate dashboard,
relying on many different tools while trying
to make them work together – at a time
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
Issue 18
45