13.1 Running a service is not a system

When you want to compare historical volumes or activity at a particular moment in time, Cacti can provide it.

Culture and tools

As you might expect from an open source tool set, both of these tools are highly extensible. We have been able to write and adapt agents to interface with them, with the exception of our database monitoring, and we have been able to monitor and trend all our services.

I spoke above about getting the culture right, putting these critical volumes onto big flat screens, making them obvious to everyone in your operations and service team. This was the single most important cultural change we made next to implementing an ITIL service culture.

The real question here is how we’ve been allowed to put all this instrumentation all over our application. Most government contracts are outsourced, but we chose to in-source our operations and development teams.

In-source, out-source, open-source, right-source

It’s about your technology strategy?

To understand this we need to talk about technology in a business context. Most organisations have either an implicit or explicit technology strategy. Within our organisation our Technology Strategy provides us with a framework that allows an organisation to make ‘good’, strategic choices, i.e. Hardware, software, monitoring systems, hosting providers. These choices are deployed within a governance framework to ensure that the business and service models that are dependant on technology can be delivered now and the future.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the selection of technology and service model an organisation chooses can mean the difference between a successful business and one that fails. As a consequence, organisations and IT directors tend to be conservative in there decision making.

At a simplistic level, technology is used for three things within an organisation:

• to run the business
• to change the business
• to innovate

Unless you are a start-up, the bulk of investment and cost is already sunk in running your company. Changing the company IS usually occurs incrementally and takes the form of modifying the status quo. We are left with the shinny innovation tip of the cost iceberg to introduce new ways of doing things.

If we accept some of the above, we can see that technology strategies have considerable inertia, and unless there are some strong external pressures (failure to meet Service levels, company financial pressure, loss of market share), the adoption of new technologies is going to be slow. There is still a lot of COBOL out there!

So if you already don’t have a lot of open source in use, introducing it requires overcoming quite a lot of inertia.

As a company we have mandated the use of specific open-source operating systems and applications within our technology strategy where we can see cost and risk reduction. It’s worth saying that if our service was totally outsourced then these would not be our choices to make, other than at contracting and its very dangerous form to tell a supplier both what you want and how to do it.