No matter what the emerging trend is in our industry, one of the constants is building core competencies around elegant solutions that empower storage administrators and partners to be more successful.
But what defines a “successful solution”? Take monitoring and analytics dashboards, for instance – where we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. We can approach it by first defining stages, where Success 1.0 was all about monitoring – presenting information to admins to help them react to critical events, or to be blunt: dashboards that help the admin keep their job. However, that’s no longer good enough. So, how do we take that to the next level? Or, in other words, what defines Success 2.0?
Today, what differentiates a good dashboard from a great dashboard in the monitoring and analytics space is if it can help me be proactive, rather than reactive. I personally don’t want a dashboard that will help me keep my job, I want one that will help me do my job so well I will be promoted.
It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again because a). it remains to be true, and b). it’s a challenge that’s not going away any time soon, maybe ever: We are inundated with data every moment of every day. So now, the challenge turns to figuring out how to easily leverage the power of that data so that it’s not a distraction or a hindrance, but something that empowers us. The question I ask myself when it comes to monitoring and analytics, dashboards and data efficiency is “How can data help to make users more effective, dynamic, and productive?”
Towards a Proactive Consumption Model
The key to achieving efficiency via data is being able to filter out the noise and transform data to information, information to insights, and then finally from insights to action. Insights can be used to drive desired behaviors or to generate positive business outcomes. The one constant to truly realizing value is taking action.
Being strategic is all about predicting what will happen in the future with confidence. This is a world where trend analysis on usage can be used to predict when additional capabilities are required. Next-generation monitoring and analytics platforms can predict failures and optimizations on the fly from telemetry data. At a glance, a user can model decisions before they are made and know what impact they will have.
By leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning, dashboard interactions are changing from being reactively accessed to a proactive consumption model. This allows for deeper strategic interactions that are focused on value-added capabilities that go above and beyond day-to-day operations and support.
This flips the script. Instead of going to a legacy monitoring dashboard to troubleshoot or placing a help desk call, users now can interface with analytics dashboards to track and optimize environments to meet specific business goals, ensuring compliance with best practices that are uniquely offered for specific workloads.
This can be a strategic weapon in the vast toolkit of the administrator. From there, it becomes the “brains” that tune and optimize things on the fly and provide visibility into how the system is optimized in accordance with identified business objectives.
This is what Success 2.0 looks like—and this is the world that we are envisioning at DataCore.
Stay tuned for more in this space and, in the meantime, read more on the power of predictive analytics and actionable insights, or connect with me on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going.
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