Establishing Enterprise Monitoring Baselines

Enterprise monitoring gets a great deal more air time these days than it ever did in the past. Like as not it's because our innovation dependent lives have become some so reliant on the availability of systems and infrastructural services. Have things improved? How would you know?

In reality, monitoring systems themselves are nothing particularly new. Consider the pressure valve on a steam boiler. At most rudimentary level, the object of the valve is to release pressure. The way you decide whether or not to release pressure is to observe the gauge that indicates the boiler's pressure. Steam engines have been around for hundreds of years and gauges to monitor them, probably nearly as long. The thermostat on your house heating system, the temperature gauge on your car's engine, the battery life monitor on your phone; they're all monitors, like as not not "enterprisey" however you get the idea.

Most of us, no doubt will have seen one or more of the many Hollywood blockbuster movies that features some drama that involves gauges and monitors. Clearly the recent unfortunate circumstances at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster were of particular importance globally because of the seriousness of the events and the fact that as the disaster unfolded the news was relayed across international networks following the Tsunami. More important here, is the need to consider that if there was not some sort of monitoring it would have been impossible to comment on the significance of the reactor temperatures and other factors until the fires and explosions had already occurred. The process of testing air quality, water and milk quality and the general radioactivity characteristics of the community all represented some level of monitoring as well. Nevertheless effective monitoring was only as a matter of fact measurable against some sort of yardstick - a baseline.

Establishing a baseline is key even though for effective implementation of anything new. If for instance, your plan is to replace your organization's paper forms processing innovation with an electronic forms solution with workflow, based on a technology of the same type provided by Winshuttle, you need to understand some basic metrics about what you are trying to do and what your expectations should be around general performance and operational function.

At the end of many SKYPE VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls for instance, a call quality poll is presented to help in assessing the quality of the encoding algorithms and application performance.

Product Manager at Winshuttle

Clinton Jones is a Product Manager at Winshuttle. He is experienced in international research and business process with a focus on integrated business technologies. Clinton as well services a technical consultant on research and quality management as it relates to data and process management and governance. Previously coming to Winshuttle, Clinton served as a Technical Quality Manager at SAP. Twitter @winshuttle