IT Ops Pros Need More Mobile Monitoring Solutions

How often are you actually at your desk these days in front of your PC? The fact is you need access to monitoring data wherever you are, just as your users need to access to their content wherever they are. That’s why the dearth of mobile monitoring tools is troubling.

While I was at CeBIT last year, the enormous German technology conference, I attended a briefing by Microsoft on a new cloud monitoring product called InTune. Since it works in the cloud, it would make sense that Microsoft closed the cloud-mobile connection and created a mobile app for monitoring pros on the go.

Unfortunately (at least at the time), they only went as far as sending an email alert when a configured event occurred. That’s OK as far as it goes, but an app that sent you a text message or a pop-up on your cell phone when an event occurred with a link back to the monitoring app would have been far better.

Kudos for Microsoft for the idea, but points taken away for lack of mobile execution.

VMware took it a step further when they introduce virtual machine monitoring tools for the iPad last spring. Now we were getting somewhere. You carry your iPad to a meeting. You get an alert and you can access your tools in one smooth set of actions.

The fact is that we are all mobile professionals, no matter what our role, and IT Ops pros certainly have to be on alert even when they are not at the office. Wouldn’t life be simpler, if the call to action was more than an emergency phone call? Wouldn’t it be better to have access to your monitoring tools on the fly in real time?

It would certainly save you when you were at your kid’s soccer game and the inevitable alert came in that the key servers running your company’s most critical application were down. Instead of leaving the game (while frantically arranging a ride home for your child), getting in your car and driving into work, it would be nice to pull out your smart phone, run an app and see if you can fix the problem remotely.

You might still have to make that trek to work, but at least you have a first line of defense that provides you with some key information and maybe lets you try a few things remotely that might get things moving again.

The mobile-cloud trend is not new, but perhaps what is new is the idea that it should extend beyond knowledge workers, sales and other more obvious mobile employees to IT Ops, which also needs to access information, perhaps even more so, than other employees in an organization.

As this becomes more apparent, it’s likely that we will see more mobile monitoring tools to help IT Ops pros access monitoring tools wherever they are. It would certainly make sense to have them.