What Changed? Do You Really Know What Actually Changed in Your Environment? (Part 1)
This article is part of a series covering how changes still present a risk for today's IT operations, despite advances in technology and processes, and how a change-centric analytics approach addresses this.
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It has been said that change is the root of all evil. The majority of incidents that’s what we hear from our customers and you can see here:
Gartner confirms this observation, asserting that the majority of incidents can be traced back to some kind of change - a change in application, in infrastructure, in configuration, in data, or in workload.
There’s always some change that will be the cause of the incident. Or in other words, if you don’t touch your environment, then it probably remain stable.
Customers very frequently tell us that when they declare a change freeze, like at the end of the year, the amount of incidents drastically drop - almost to zero.
So why does it happen? Why does change disrupt stable operations?
Today’s IT Processes
Many enterprise organizations have a very well defined and organized change management process:
- plan the changes
- go through the workflow and the service desk
- approve the changes
- review the impact of the changes
Many organizations are automating the implementation of changes with application release automation and infrastructure automation. In the end, whatever the process is it is very difficult to understand and know what actually changed in your environment despite all of this planning and applying automated releases along with some manual changes.
Monitoring for the Impact of Changes
Today, IT is really just monitoring for the impact of changes. That’s why we have all the application performance management tools, infrastructure monitoring tools, natural monitoring, and log analysis. All these tools look for symptoms. They are looking for the signs that show the impact created by a risky change. When the incident occurs, it is investigated, looking at the root cause. And one of the first questions is “What changed?” Keep coming back to this, trying to find this basic information. Today it is often found by going around and asking people or by reverse engineering from a change ticket in the service desk.
Evolven Change-Centric Analytics
That’s exactly the problem that Evolven is trying to solve.
Evolven collects information about the changes and differences in your environment. Our own technology scans your environment and gets very granular, very deep information about the changes in your application, in your infrastructure, in all the different aspects of your environments.
See Evolven in action!
Unlock the power of actual changes. Register now for a live demo.
