Building Consensus for Monitoring System Selection

“I want central visibility of the availability and performance of networks, servers, applications, and service levels. I’m ready to select the tool; I just need to get consensus from all of my guys that we are moving in the right direction and that they will actually use what we choose.” —The Management

This refrain should sound familiar to most of us. We hear it from our customers and prospects on a very regular basis and we see them working really hard within their organizations to get the needed consensus before they are able to move forward with the selection of tools needed to manage their businesses.

Building consensus for the selection of software tools for monitoring can seem like getting the blind men to agree about the nature of the elephant. The problem is literally that each group has a very different view of reality. It can be difficult and require time and subtlety to achieve the required agreement. Here are some points that have been useful to achieving consensus for tool selection:

• Select a multi-tool architecture that will support good process driven management rather than a single tool that seems to meet current needs.
• Consulting Version 3 of ITIL will add confidence to your decisions. Check out Service Operations Chapter 7. http://www.itsmfusa.org/publications
• Don’t take successful monitoring tools away from groups that are using them; instead, integrate new and existing tools.
• As a class, these tools are low in cost and provide open architecture that give the flexibility that is required to future-proof the decision. Lower cost investments make consensus easier to obtain and reduce the business risk of deployment.

These points aren’t shortcuts. You will still need to meet with each group, determine their needs, and gain support for an architecture that supports service level management through the measurement and communication of service levels.

If you have had experience with this that you would like to share or could use GroundWork’s help building consensus about monitoring tool selection, contact me, Dave Lilly, at [email protected].