A lot of times as administrators or infrastructure people we all too often get stuck “keeping the lights on”. What I mean by this, is we have our tools and scripts in place to monitor all of our services and databases, we have notification set up to alert us when they are down or experiencing trouble, and we have our troubleshooting methodologies and exercises that we go through in order to get everything back up and running.
The problem being, that's where our job usually ends. We simply fix the issue and must move on to the next issue in order to keep the business up. Not that often do we get the chance to research a better way of monitoring or a better way of doing things. And when we do get that time, how do we get these projects financially backed by a budget?
Throughout my career there have been plenty of times where I have mentioned the need for better or faster storage, more memory, more compute, and different pieces of software to better support me in my role. However the fact of the matter without proof on how these upgrades or greenfield deployments will impact the business, or better yet, how the business will be impacted without them, there's a pretty good chance that the answer will always be no.
So I’m constantly looking for that silver bullet if you will – something that I can take to my CTO/CFO in order to validate my budget requests. The problem being, most performance monitoring applications spit out reports dealing with very technical metrics. My CTO/CFO do not care about the average response time of a query. They don’t care about table locking and blocking numbers. What they want to see is how what I’m asking for can either save them money or make them money.
So this is where I struggle and I’m asking you, the thwack community for your help on this one – leave a comment with your best tip or strategy on using performance data and metrics to get budgets and projects approved. Below are a few questions to help you get started.
- How do you present your case to a CTO/CFO? Do you have some go to metrics that you find they understand more than others?
- Do you correlate performance data with other groups of financial data to show a bottom line impact of a performance issue or outage?
- Do you map your performance data directly to SLA’s that might be in place? Does this help in selling your pitch?
- Do you have any specific metrics or performance reports you use to show your business stakeholders the impact on customer satisfaction or brand reputation?
Thanks for reading – I look forward to hearing from you.