A Single Pane of Glass for Multi-Platform Systems Management

The Myth about Single-Pane-of-Glass Systems Management

Today’s workforce has a great opportunity to be productive and get their work done from just about anywhere. This is thanks to the ever-increasing accessibility of IT. That said, providing remote workers with mobile-friendly, browser-based access comes with complications that can’t be ignored.

The IT teams supporting organizations that offer this kind of flexibility must be able to securely manage a complex configuration of applications, devices, and business-critical information while allowing employees to engage with the systems in a variety of ways.

Even small organizations must find cost-effective ways to manage their different entities, from applications, servers, and networks to storage and remote devices.

With so many moving pieces—and with so much riding on the availability and security of these technologies—is it possible for an IT team to manage it all through a single pane of glass? Or is the concept just a myth?

Stories of Systems Management in the Past

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane. For many IT professionals who first began their careers in IT perhaps 25 or 30 years ago, they were concerned with one thing: the system. That was all they needed to know and understand.

Time has passed and IT professionals now must multitask across different operating systems, networks, and an ever-growing number of applications that are critical to the success of the organization.

Specialization was a buzzword in the IT industry, promising increased productivity and efficiencies of resource. Large organizations kept the application, server, storage, and network teams separate from each other.

IT managers purchased separate software solutions with specialist functionality for each team because collaboration between the teams was infrequent. Each silo was responsible for its own management and decision making. This legacy still holds true today, with even more silos adding more complexity to the infrastructure.

Nowadays, it’s common to see additional silos for virtualization and cloud teams, using yet more tools and different applications. Such complex arrangements can lead to a collection of disparate IT departments, often duplicating services and leading to a maze of options to consider when problems arise.

This causes inefficiencies in the business, recognizable from the following symptoms:

1. Individual workers are limited to looking after only a part of an organization’s infrastructure. This leads to inflexibility among staff because they can only manage a subset of the bigger picture. They are unable to provide cover for other IT silos. Consequently, there is little or no transfer of skills.
2. Multiple tools and interfaces require staff to become jacks of all trades. This can reduce both productivity and morale as individuals are frequently required to work outside of their skillset.
3. The time taken to resolve issues can increase if problems cut across multiple teams and platforms, all using different tools.

As a result of these symptoms, the organization becomes sluggish, critical systems and applications can become unavailable, which in turn can have potential implications for orders, shipments, or transactions. When this happens, the inability to respond in a timely manner can have far-reaching consequences.

We can see the value of a single pane of glass that brings the management and monitoring of disparate systems, platforms, devices, and applications together in one place and on one screen, creating a consistent and common methodology to varying departments within the IT infrastructure.

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Figure 1: Modern day solos in a common IT infrastructure

By having a single-pane-of-glass solution in place, you minimize the confusion and remove the obstructions that can prevent the business from moving forward.

A classic example that demonstrates how the failure to simplify processes for operations staff can lead to potential disaster is the famous Three Mile Island nuclear reactor incident that occurred in 1979.

You might recall that this incident was caused by the emergency cooling systems being shut down due to operator error. During the first few minutes, over 100 alarms went off, but there was no differentiation between what was and what was not important. Consequently, staff took the wrong actions, which nearly led to a disaster of unimaginable proportions.

What was required was a simple means of communicating messages and instructions to staff in a clear, consistent, and easily understood manner so that the important could be distinguished from the trivial.

More recently, PIXAR animation studios nearly lost a year’s worth of animation for Toy Story 2 after someone mistakenly ran a command that removed everything on the file system where the film had been saved.

To make matters worse, when investigated further, it was discovered that the file backup had failed to work for the last month. Luckily, a staff member had been working from home and had saved the missing files, so they were able to salvage the film from her computer!

Both of these companies suffered from a lack of communication, separate and unregulated processes, and a poorly implemented set of actions to take when things went wrong. Could either have benefited from managing their systems and controls through the single-pane-of-glass concept?

Building the Framework

The concept of managing IT infrastructures through a single pane of glass has been with us for some time. Yet, with the rapid rate at which technology continues to advance, it has become somewhat of a mythical utopia among IT managers seeking to simplify their operations and resource management.

Early adopters of this concept provided toolsets with basic monitoring functionality, but which lacked the simplicity the organization required to make them useful. As vendors struggled to fill the monitoring void with solutions that were prohibitively expensive or by providing tools that failed to keep pace with the systems they were supposed to be monitoring, IT departments developed their own internal solutions, unique to their own requirements.

The end result? A tapestry of individual packages written by famous name vendors, third-party specialists, and in-house development teams tailored to the silo they were designed for yet woven into the fabric of the organization infrastructure that they were meant to be supporting.

This is why IT managers across the globe often wonder whether there is one, affordable solution that can solve all of their problems.

Achieving 20/20 Vision

So, do you need to rip it all up and start again? Far from it! It would be impractical to suggest that you sacrifice previous investments in systems and applications in search of the Holy Grail. However, a good single-pane-of-glass solution will already interface with any in-house and legacy applications that you are already running and combine them in a single integrated solution.

Two good examples of single-pane-of-glass solutions that have been widely adopted and have been proven to work in an everyday environment are Apple and Android smart devices.

It wasn’t all that long ago when, if you were going on vacation, you would probably take a collection of maps, maybe a book or two to read, a music player, and some board games to play in the event of bad weather. Now you just take your iPhone, iPad, or other smartphone or tablet device with you.

GPS replaces the maps, eBook readers replace paperbacks, and multimedia and game apps replace the other items. You have access to everything that you had before, but now you’ve got it all in one place and it’s far easier to manage!

When choosing the single-pane-of-glass solution for your organization, be sure you look for these five essential features:

1. Flexibility

Your single-pane-of-glass solution needs to be truly flexible and capable of handling large volumes of data in real time and from multiple operating systems, networks, business applications, and remote devices.

If the proposed solution can only process information from a single source or has limitations to the type or volume of data it can handle, then it can’t offer a true reflection of what’s happening within the organization. It will inevitably fall short of what’s required when management starts asking questions and requesting specific—often critical—information.

You also need to be sure that it can be configured to provide both local and remote monitoring and that it can notify you of any issues in a variety of different formats, such as email and SMS, or even by audible alert. Figure 2 demonstrates the level of flexibility that you should aim for when selecting your solution.

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Figure 2: Common requirements of local and remote monitoring in a modern enterprise

2. Accessibility

How does the solution guarantee accessibility to your vital IT systems and processes? For example, how can important information that you rely on to make critical business decisions be received and viewed simultaneously from multiple locations around the world?

If this is not possible, and your organization is active in the global marketplace or you have remote locations that depend on system availability, you may be placing your organization at risk by not being able to react in time to critical events that could potentially affect your customers.

3. Automation

To stem the flow of information produced from your monitoring activities, the solution must be capable of automatically filtering the important from the unimportant so that you’re immediately aware whenever you need to take action.

Failure to do so will result in your single-pane-of-glass view misting over with the vast array of information being generated from within the business. A basic monitoring service will let you know when critical events have completed as expected, but what about when such events have not completed?

A single-pane-of-glass solution must be able to draw your immediate attention to these events as they can quickly bring your business to a halt if they haven’t happened when expected. You need to be made aware of these kinds of issues as quickly as possible so you can take action.

Of course, being able to take action relies on you knowing that something has happened, and if you are unavailable, the situation can soon escalate. Therefore, your solution should be capable of responding to events and incidents without human intervention and take automatic action wherever possible.

If not possible, built-in escalation methods need to be available so that someone can step into your shoes and take the appropriate steps to resolve the issue if you are unable to respond. Ideally, the solution should be capable of capturing previous responses by operational staff so that a good knowledge base is created and shared across the IT team.

4. Integration

The whole purpose of a single-pane-of-glass solution is that it integrates with your existing systems, platforms, and processes. Some vendors support only their own software and others rely on third parties to develop software for them, which may integrate well with the original vendor offering but frequently lacks the required levels of detail required to be considered a viable alternative.

It should also be possible to perform the integration on a step-by-step basis. It’s impractical to replace entire systems and working practices that may have been in place for many years in a single, overnight session. Far better the approach that allows you to add a little at a time so that different IT silos, user groups, and management can become confident with the approach.

Apart from integrating with their own system monitoring and management software, Halcyon software interfaces with recognized open source systems such as security information event managers (SIEM), log amalgamators, IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol, and any syslog or SNMP compliant system. Halcyon also accepts feed from many other third-party systems monitoring tools.

Your chosen solution should also be capable of automatically raising and assigning help desk tickets using your preferred help desk system and based on your own customizable rules.

5. Mobility

What happens to your view when you leave the office? A fully functional single-pane-of-glass solution should offer you mobile options. There is little point in having a single-pane-of-glass view if you are forced to draw the blinds across it for part of the day.

Halcyon’s Enterprise Console provides true mobility across both Apple and Android platforms, giving full, on-the-go functionality so you can see at a glance what is happening within your business center at any time and from any place where you can access the internet, all from your own device.

This means that you can instantly take the same actions and decisions on critical events as and when they arise in the same manner that you would if you were sitting at your desk.

The Clear Benefits

Operating a single-pane-of-glass management strategy can bring many benefits to the organization. The following are the four primary reasons for working toward this approach:

1. Simplification

Having a single, integrated solution simplifies multiple processes and technologies across your organization. Everybody works in harmony rather than in isolation. Staff shortages and absences become easier to manage as everyone is familiar with the same system, so transferring staff between teams is no longer so much of an issue where understanding the technology is concerned.

2. Consistency

Having a single pane of glass allows you to apply a consistent approach to any issues that arise. Everyone knows what to do and what is expected of them. Management teams know that any given issue is going to get the same response no matter who is investigating the problem. By applying a consistent approach, service-level agreements and management reporting requirements are also easier to achieve, as the information is standardized across the infrastructure.

3. Prioritization

Being able to see everything in one place makes it easier to prioritize what needs doing, by when, and by whom. This means that you can apply the most capable resource at the appropriate time to resolving issues that, if left or handled inappropriately, would have an impact on the organization.

4. Efficiency

When your system monitoring and management tools are located in a central location rather than isolated silos, it becomes easier to identify duplicated effort. This allows you to redeploy valuable resources onto other projects that are more beneficial to the organization.

The Halcyon Approach

There are two elements that contribute to a single-pane-of-glass strategy in Halcyon’s approach to the concept.

1. A central hub of information

Halcyon’s Enterprise Console provides a central hub of real-time information regarding the status of your entire IT infrastructure, including IBM i, AIX, Linux, and Windows operating platforms.

Comprehensive filters can be set to automatically reply to alerts, escalate actions, change severity levels, and forward alerts. Automated responses can be set for common issues, reducing response time and eliminating the opportunity for human error. The dashboard view displays user-defined, color-coded options so that you can quickly and easily see what needs to be resolved as well as the status of any devices operating on your network.

Fully functional versions of Halcyon’s Enterprise Console are also available as apps for the Apple and Android platforms, allowing you to work remotely regardless of where you or your IT systems are located.

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Figure 3: Halcyon's Enterprise Console 

2. Multi-Platform Monitoring and Automation

Underpinning the Enterprise Console interface (your single pane of glass) are Halcyon’s specialist tools written natively for individual platforms such as IBM i, AIX, Linux, and Windows.

Halcyon writes specific software code to cater to the different types of computer architecture widely used in today’s organizations. We know that native solutions allow you to drill down to the depth of detail necessary to understand why a particular process, job, or event has failed so that you can rapidly respond to any situation in a fast-moving business environment.

We use the integrated, front-end, single pane of glass (Enterprise Console) to provide an intuitive interface that receives feeds from Halcyon monitoring software as well as from open source software, business applications (such as ERP, HA, and financial), and other third-party tools. This means that IT managers have visibility into all alerts and centralized control of their entire IT enterprise.

Depending on the complexity of your IT infrastructure, a good combination of monitoring and automation solutions would consist of Halcyon’s Operations Center Suite (if you have IBM i systems) and Network Server Suite (for AIX, Linux, and Windows servers).