Article from Stratagy's newsletter - fall 1996 issue

As most IT managers, you probably invest considerable effort and expense in operational activities, in manual "baby-sitting" of your system and in solving production problems caused by application failures and operational errors. The cost of system downtime is constantly rising and having to monitor growing networks and increasingly complex applications require serious and ongoing evaluation of your ability to manage your system and handle future system and application growth. Attention and investment of resources must be shifted from manual operations and training, to automated software solutions. But first, let's test your management approach:

You are REACTIVE to your system if:

The user is first to detect problems
Problems escalate rapidly without control to a point where downtime is inevitable
The immediate solution to unexpected problems is not readily available
Your system's downtime and application recoverability is unpredictable
You require on-site expert personnel to support the system
Under pressure, you and your staff make mistakes and cause more problems
You spend significant resources on manual operations and training
You get paged at night

You are PROACTIVE to your system if you:

Quickly and automatically resolve potential problems without interruption
Created and unattended, self-correcting environment
Reduced operations and training costs
Reduced the human error factor
Improved user perception of the system

Simply said, it is next to impossible to run a critical business application on the Stratus without automated monitoring and system tools. The hardware may be close to perfect (almost 100% uptime) but the software is NOT perfect and so are we - human beings that are watching the taking care of the system and are almost guaranteed to make mistakes.

Attempting to run the Stratus without automated software tools is like trying to fly a jet airplane in an all-manual mode without any computers - it is simply not done.

In the next article, we will discuss simple and very practical solutions that you can easily implement. You may decide to develop such tools yourself or turn to one of the many third-party software solutions that are available today. As Miguel de Cervantes, a Spanish author said: "To be prepared is half the victory".