You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure

Many companies start with a vision and a plan, but usually go through a period where things are always chaotic and in flux. I call this ‘chaos’ mode.

Good managers learn that getting out of this endless mode where everything is always “on fire” requires some basic management tools. Specifically, being able to objectively measure the success or failure of certain initiatives (using hard numbers) allowing management to make better decisions and stabilize the company.

The old adage here is true: you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

This is why a state-of-the-art monitoring system is at the heart of our managed service plans.  It allows us to manage your IT assets by measuring their performance.

For example: let’s take a typical server.  We measure over 70 different items on that server every 5 minutes: some of these include CPU usage (on all cores), disk space, disk I/O utilization, memory usage (including a breakdown by process), IP address (in case it changes), virus protection status, patch status, uptime, serial number, warranty expiration, service availability and then have additional metrics for specific applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Sharepoint and a whole lot more.

In addition, we have automatic actions that solve some common problems: is your Print Spooler prone to failure because of a weird printer driver?  We can auto-restart that service – and we’re notified when it happens.

All of this information about all of your IT assets is constantly fed into our system. We then run this out to a separate heavy-duty reporting system (a REALLY BIG database) that crunches the numbers and runs high-level reports that help us help you to figure out where to allocate your IT spending.

It’s part of what we do for you on a daily basis and is core to our plans.  We can manage your IT systems because we are constantly measuring them.