IBM recently posted a on incorporating predictive analytics into service assurance – equating it to picking a BBQ joint. Too funny!
It’s great that the Acronym vendors are finally talking about analytics in service management… but here’s the problem – all of the data they are talking about is historical. They are pulling data after the fact, analyzing trends after the fact, and putting together things long after the service has crashed.
It’s like watching a cheesy movie where the mouth movements happen and seconds later, you hear the sound.
Today’s World of IT Changes All the Time
Take a close look at dynamic cloud environments like vMotion, SDN, and NFV technologies. You’ll quickly realize you may not get the EXACT same patterns every time. Things are even more dynamic in Service Provider environments.
There are two ways to look at analytics in an Operations environment:
- POST Cognitive
- PRE Cognitive
Post-cognitive is focusing your service management efforts on looking at events that occurred in a history after an outage.
Post-cognitive is akin to driving down the road while looking out of the back window.
The Acronym vendors are living in a post-cognitive world. They expect you to use their tools to identify and build rules around these patterns that you mine and extract. They equate the complex discipline of Service Assurance to a simple task like choosing where to eat dinner.
The Next Generation is Here
It’s time to move beyond the post-cognitive limitations. At Moogsoft, we do analytics with a pre-cognitive view.
- Pre-cognitive is focusing Situational Awareness on events as they occur
- Pre-cognitive is akin to driving down the road looking forward
Incident.Moog takes in event streams in whatever form: partial, incomplete, even skewed across time, and produces in real-time clusters of alerts that are related (Situations).
Incident.MOOG then creates Situation Rooms, a collaborative UI where teams work together better and restore a service-affecting situation faster. This goes far beyond that one guy you’ve built that root cause pattern for.
It’s Your Choice
Using analytics of histories to develop patterns for the future can be misdirected. This is one reason why Waterfall implementation methods can’t work in rapidly changing and morphing environments.
It’s also why Expanding Spiral and Agile methodologies came into being, and it’s part of the reason why developers like DevOps environments. You need to be operating in the pre-cognitive way to support developing fast and often, allowing your business to win by quickly meeting your customer’s requirements.
You have a choice. You can spend your time staring at the past OR you can work a better way and deliver great service now.
Looking back at the past to predict the future might be one way to pick a BBQ joint, but it’s no way to architect service assurance in the 21st century. Wake up, Acronym vendors! It’s a new world. And the next generation is eating your lunch.
