In this data-driven era, business organizations must make the best use of aggregated data. Leaving business data unattended will do no good to a business organization. A company must make sure it collects business data daily for further use. Many IT professionals think that businesses only need to collect customer data to understand buying trends. Well, understanding customer data is important to respond to customer demands. Besides customer data, business organizations should also focus on collecting performance data across software systems for fault management. You can determine performance and end-user issues to boost your overall service availability. Read on to know how real-time data aggregation improves business reliability and service availability.

Data aggregation for boosting service availability

What type of data should be collected by business organizations to boost service availability? Well, before you know about data aggregation, you should understand the concept of service availability. A business organization depends on many software systems for its survival. Those software systems should be up and running to make sure your business services are always available to the customers. For keeping the systems up and running, you need performance/log data. What is the use of customer buying trends for keeping the critical software systems online? Sales data is important for marketers that are looking to promote the business products/services. For boosting service availability, you need data related to software systems, end-user devices, etc.

The types of data that should be collected by business organizations to boost service availability and business reliability are as follows:

• Collecting performance data across the IT infrastructure is of utmost importance for any business organization. Service availability is disrupted when some performance issues occur with the critical software systems. The best practice is to collect log data for as long as the systems are online.
• Many business organizations opted for virtual desktop infrastructure solutions in recent times. The spread of the COVID pandemic across the globe forced organizations to use virtual desktop infrastructure solutions. When working remotely, employees install virtual machines on their devices besides using company devices. You need to collect data about the employee behavior on virtual machines to make sure they are working.
• Customers use digital channels offered by businesses to interact with their services. Websites and business applications are the common digital channels used by customers. Besides customers, cyber attackers also use digital channels to enter the organization’s internal network. If a cyber attacker gets into your internal network, it can have adverse effects on the service availability. It is why you should also collect data regarding customer behavior on different digital channels.
• When a software system fails or, a performance issue is detected, it is called an IT incident or IT event. Every time an IT incident/event/disaster occurs, you need to document it. Data regarding the occurrence of the IT event needs to be stored. It helps IT firms calculate the average time to discover and resolve IT incidents. Also, it will if a similar type of incident occurs within the IT infrastructure in the future.

Challenges with data aggregation for boosting service availability

If collecting these types of data for boosting service availability was so easy, there would not be many data aggregators in the market. Data collection across the entire IT infrastructure can be a tedious task for IT teams. The challenges faced by IT individuals in data aggregation for boosting service availability and business reliability are:

• Manually collecting performance data across many software systems is a challenge for IT firms. Data analysts must spend days collecting log data from several software systems.
• Organizations are lacking observability into their IT infrastructure as software systems are becoming rigid. Poor observability keeps you from knowing the internal states of your software systems. When you don’t know about the internal state of any system, you cannot know much about its performance.
• Performance data is collected to identify performance issues and security threats. However, IT teams gain access to log data after a performance issue has occurred and hampered the service availability. It teams cannot collect performance data proactively with age-old data aggregators in the market.
• When organizations are scaling up, they install more software systems with their premises. To maintain the optimum performance of software systems, rigorous monitoring is required. A business organization cannot keep on increasing the number of system administrators every time they scale up.
• In the wake of the COVID pandemic, businesses are using virtual desktop infrastructure solutions which are hard to monitor. Businesses need to monitor the activity of employees that are working remotely.
• Business organizations are facing issues in monitoring the network devices due to increased complexity. You must collect data regarding the performance of network devices like switches, routers, and load balancers.

What’s the solution for real-time data aggregation?

Given the need for real-time user monitoring tools, AIOps is the viable solution. With the power of machine learning and AI, you can rigorously collect IT data that could help you boost service availability. Unlike traditional monitoring tools, AIOps based analytics platforms collect performance data over a wide span. For event correlation, AIOps based analytics platforms can use historical data from previous years. Also, you don’t need to hire many system administrators as AIOps-based monitoring will automate several mundane tasks.

AIOps based analytics platforms have the power to collect data from numerous sources like software systems, virtual machines, digital channels, and end-user devices. Once the data is collected, an AIOps-based monitoring solution will analyze it to find error patterns and performance issues. With the best AIOps products and tools, you can also perform SNMP monitoring which, is the monitoring of network devices.

Conclusion

Small deductions in the service availability can add up to a huge loss over time for a business organization. If businesses want their systems to be online all the time, they should focus on rigorous data aggregation across the entire IT infrastructure and connected devices. Boost your service availability with AIOps-led data aggregation.