There is a movement in the datacenter circles to rethink metrics.  What are the right metrics for performance?  The industry is moving towards heavily towards Application Performance oriented metrics for better business visibility into their Data Centers and away from traditional “up / down status” reporting.

Faster troubleshooting is increasingly important especially as companies begin to realize how much time and productivity is actually wasted with finger-pointing between Network, Application and Server teams.

These siloed IT teams are all too often using different tools looking at disconnected metrics. Having more decentralized lower cost technologies leads more proliferation within an enterprise and IT.  The big problem is that as the performance and cost of these new technologies increase so does the manual labor to make them all work.  This is compounded by how an IT organization is structured.  If the organization’s are silo’d then those environments are in deep trouble.

Will 70 Metrics Do The Job ?

A primary goal should be to get them all working from the same sheet of music leveraging best of breed and Integrated tools to troubleshoot performance problems at lightning speed completely across network and server environments.  Also, “metric reporting” is almost becoming a commodity market; solutions that actually offer advanced analytics and a co-relational understanding of these metrics offer key differentiators for datacenter performance management.

Enterprises and IT have to align their business objectives with real IT metrics not some narrow spec traditionally employed by IT.

{Editors note:  Andy Fields @painpoint contributed to this post. – thanks Andy}