Preliminary findings of TRAC’s end-user survey show that organizations are still struggling to gain full visibility into their IT services and infrastructure. Many of the organizations surveyed are reporting that, even though they made significant investments in new IT monitoring and management tools and increased the amount of performance data that they have on hand, they are still not seeing any significant improvements in key performance indicators (KPI). More than half of these organizations are reporting that the performance data they are collecting is not actionable and many of them find it difficult to prevent performance issues before end-users are impacted.

Organizations have been asking for more visibility into IT performance and many vendors responded by providing more monitoring points, better network taps, new modules for seeing deeper into parts of the infrastructure or expanding monitoring into new areas. These product enhancements did help organizations see deeper and wider, but didn’t necessarily help them have more visibility. Now that organizations have all of this data on hand, the challenge becomes: how to make the most sense of it and turn this data into actionable information?

Some vendors realized this opportunity and designed management solutions for correlating, normalizing and providing the right context for the data that organizations have access to.

One of the examples of this type of vendor includes ASG Software. The company’s Enterprise Automation Management Suite (EAMS) sits on top of multiple tools for monitoring IT infrastructure and services and enables companies to put this data into the right context so they can identify and resolve performance issues. Also, VKernel is a virtualization management vendor that leverages data collected mostly from VMware management tools and applies a set of algorithms that allow organizations to conduct a “what-if analysis” for capacity planning, optimization and inventory management in virtualized environments. Another example of a vendor who is capitalizing on this opportunity is Netuitive. The company’s self-learning technology provides dynamic performance thresholds and performance data correlation capabilities that allow organizations to leverage data from other monitoring tools and constantly adjust to changes in IT environments, while reducing management overhead. Also, Monolith Software is providing a platform for correlating and normalizing information about different aspects of IT management, such as asset, fault or performance management.