Is automation necessary?

Automation is a popular subject right now, but is it just a short-term topic or is it here to stay?

Do you have a monitoring system that is manually provisioned? Then you could be suffering from loss of income or unnoticed failures right now. At Compose IT we have during our 600 000 hours of experience from working with network monitoring, seen the problems manual provision can cause.

Following an investment in a monitoring solution it should be set up in such a way that it constantly mirrors the reality. If a monitoring solution isn’t mirroring the reality it isn’t used to its full potential. The more things missing or wrong in a monitoring solution the less value gained. However, if a monitoring solution is set up in a way it mirrors the reality from start, what can then cause wrong configurations or missing objects?

The network is constantly changing, routers are moved, switches are added, and interfaces are renamed. Therefore, the monitoring solution constantly needs to be updated to mirror reality. These updates can be done in two ways, by manual provisioning or by auto provisioning. From the beginning almost all monitoring solutions were manually provisioned and many still are.

Manual provision can cause many problems and are costly to uphold if a big network is being monitored or many changes occur. Constantly updating a monitoring solution requires available resources and usually there is more than one system that needs updating. If a monitoring system isn’t updated fast enough or wrongly, failures can go unnoticed. If the collected data is used for billing, there can even be a loss of income. What’s even worse is that it could take days or even weeks before the missing or faulty update is found. The more that is monitored the bigger the risk of missing or faulty updates and the longer it can take until the mistake is found.

Compose IT has helped several large companies to go from manual provisioning to an automatic solution and seen the difference auto provisioning makes. We have concluded that automation is definitely necessary!