Intelligent Data Centres Issue 18 | Page 46

FEATURE monitoring alerts. The moving parts move quickly and the data streaming across the infrastructure is dense and convoluted. This makes it difficult for operation teams to isolate issues quickly. The complexity of a microservice-based environment, for example, introduces data overload. This makes it difficult to connect the dots and correlate across multiple resources and quickly isolate the issue, negating or limiting its impact on the business. when they’re dealing with constrained budgets and headcount. IT operations are left scrambling to ensure the availability and performance of new as well as legacy applications and services. According to Jeff Bezos’ ‘Day Two’ philosophy, an expanding organisation tends to rely increasingly on process rather than results. When process becomes the norm, companies stop looking at outcomes and only consider whether they are doing the right thing. Their eyes are on the dashboard – not the way ahead. When to plan your operational strategy To optimise the impact and effectiveness of ongoing ‘Day Two’ operations, we need to apply and integrate operational solutions and processes during the day one planning and implementation phases of projects. A key element of this strategy should include trimming down the burgeoning dashboard by consolidating all essential monitoring functions into a single source of truth, making it easier to correlate and contextualise their information. All the more so with the trend towards microservices-based application development. These microservices are widely dispersed and their scale and transient characteristics introduce further monitoring challenges. It’s not feasible to track all the infrastructure interactions and dependencies discreetly. Instead, a baseline is developed during the development and deployment phases, which is used to quickly and proactively identify later anomalies. Without a single, accessible source of truth, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand infrastructure dependencies, build greater knowledge of the infrastructure, and learn how to quickly isolate and diagnose operational events. The implementation phase is critical in itself. It is a source of rich data needed to validate the architecture’s readiness to perform as expected, and it can lay down the baseline for subsequent operations. Autonomous operations – The next step Automating the operations process empowers IT organisations to rapidly deploy complex solutions and ensure their success beyond the implementation phase. The network produces a tremendous amount of data, including thousands of Zack Zilakakis, a product marketing leader at Apstra The ideal would be a solution that can query the single source of truth to interpret and analyse all pertinent data. The introduction of Machine Learning capability means that it can learn to contextualise and automatically identify anomalous behaviours that point to negative changes to the infrastructure. If this is done automatically, and a warning flagged before the problems occur, prompt action can be taken to resolve the issue. The meantime-to-resolution will be reduced and re-occurrences can be avoided. This is the objective of intent-based analytic solutions. To replace a tumult of data from multiple disparate monitoring tools with a single source of truth, plus a combination of rules-based principles, plus Machine Learning’s capability to grow more intelligent and aware of the entire infrastructure over time. The automobile industry has long understood this: today’s cars are far more complex, but their dashboards have become simpler – because so many tasks such as balancing ignition timing and petrol/air mix, have been automated. A simple, clear dashboard allows us to keep our attention on the way ahead. And today’s cars are both faster and safer for that. What next? Autonomous vehicles are a hot topic and the same will be true in networking. The next step in intentbased analytic networking is to automate responses to likely situations and create an autonomous network that looks after itself most of the time – allowing operators to focus on the business objectives ahead. That is ultimately what ‘intent-based networking’ is all about. ◊ 46 Issue 18 www.intelligentdatacentres.com