Continuing to manage highly complex IT environments in a reactive mode leaves IT specialists vulnerable, when really they need to understand the actual causes and effects of what’s happening among the many technologies in use across the enterprise. Instead of constantly fighting fires, IT operations teams should aim to prevent the fires from starting.

The DevOps movement was started to address the communication challenges between development and operations teams, but instead of engaging in the continuous cycle of self-improvement, management often wants to mimic techniques used by other successful companies. W. Edward Deming showed decades ago that copying others is not effective. This article suggests better approaches to good communication.

Andrew Phillips details the challenges and advantages of two specific approaches to automating server management: agentless and agent-based automation. Agent-based automation refers to when a small piece of software—called an agent, service, or daemon—is installed on each target server, whereas agentless management automation software interacts with the remote-control functionality built into each host-operating system to perform the administrative tasks.

Analytics-driven management stands to end the key challenges that constrain change and configuration management. By applying powerful analytics to the overwhelming change and configuration data, IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) technology can turn massive amounts of information into clear, actionable insights.