Introduction
The title of this post more accurately reflects the state of play with many current IT management tools. Below, I cover my main gripes with the tools that IT engineers try to squeeze for usefulness every day.
My cup floweth over
Firstly, I am disappointed that the WordPress spell checker does not include archaic English and is trying to change floweth to flowerpot.
Now, have a think about how long you have worked in IT. Now think about how you manage your estate today compared to how you did it when you started out. Sure, there may be improvements you can point out but how many of those are based on budget increases or moving to a new company, for example?
I’ve been in the industry for 10+ years (I will only ever change this figure from this point onwards for each 5 years, then when I hit 100 years, increments will be in 25’s) and I can honestly say that IT management tools have progressed at a rate that frustrates me.
I will concede that virtualisation has brought improvements with the associated toolset, but not in line with the complexity that the technology has brought with it. I remember working on a contract back in 2002 (when the servers were all bare metal) that used a Computer Associates product that allowed me to monitor a national IT estate of over 400 sites with 10000+ users and multiple data centres, deploy patches and desktop/server applications. However, the software suite was composed of several different applications all under the same badge and utilised different back end databases. They had no common interface to them. Several other tools were used to fill in some gaps. Anything that couldn’t be done with the software got scripted.
Fast forward 13 years and I’m not sure the tools we use as an industry have made 13 years worth of progress. OK, so some tools can abstract the layers beneath e.g. Microsoft VMM can now manage VMware and Hyper-V, but if these hypervisors sit on Cisco’s UCS for example, or indeed any other vendor, you have another tool for managing the hardware, a different GUI for managing backups, monitoring to any real level of usefulness will usually require a number of tools (that may or may not be available in the same GUI, with a uniform feel) that quite often come with a hefty price tag if you don’t want to spend all of your remaining life getting the thing installed, configured and maintained.
You still end up having to script the things that all these tools still fail to deliver on. What is the root of the problem? I blame the vendors. Until they start agreeing on and offering standards based management interfaces for applications to be built on, we will always have a mix and match requirement to improve our operational visibility and control.
Summary
The year is 2015 and the ecosystem is still a fragmented mess. The single pane of glass model appears to still be way over the horizon.
There are some great management tools out there, don’t get me wrong. The fact is however, that there is nothing that comes even close to being a single pane of glass that we can use to manage our estate, end to end.
I implore vendors to start standing next to each other, bang heads a few times and start working together to create the tools that will allow us, the customers, to spend less time fire fighting and flicking from one tool to another and add real value for our customers.
Till the next time.