"The data center is getting bigger and more complex and so too is the asset inventory. Every new asset has an impact on the day–to–day operations of the data center – from power consumption and problem resolution to capacity planning and change management. To achieve – and maintain – operational excellence, organizations don’t just need to know the location of their data center assets, they need to know if they are over-heating, under–performing or sitting idle."

Escalating competitive pressures, tight budgets and scarce capital resources are working in concert to intensify the importance of true alignment between IT and the organization it supports. But many of today’s enterprises are noticing a decided gap between what the business demands of IT and the realities of what IT can deliver.

Facebook is aiming to bring together data from IT, facilities and application development operations to facilitate workflow management and automation for greater operational efficiency of its datacenters. To that end, the company is developing an atypically extensive datacenter management software platform, which it has begun to deploy in some of its facilities. Facebook's datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM) system is 'hybrid' in that it includes both homegrown and commercial components.

IT organizations are increasingly being called upon to cost-effectively deliver reliable support for the entire catalog of business services, or risk outsourcing to a managed service provider. Previously, capacity planners and IT architects would use historical trends to predict capacity requirements and simply over-provision to account for any peaks caused by seasonality, error, or extraneous influences like mergers & acquisitions. Over-provisioning, combined with poor lifecycle management of new resources provisioned in the data center, has led to capacity utilization and inefficiency issues. While historical data is great for understanding past issues and current state of the environment, the performance of servers, hosts and clusters is not linear; at some level of saturation, the performance of that infrastructure will quickly start to degrade.

"End user response. To borrow a phrase, it’s where the rubber meets the road. You can be armed with vast amounts of performance metrics, but if you don’t know what users are actually experiencing, you don’t have the real performance picture. While this measure is critical, it is one many organizations fail to consistently capture. Why? This guide looks at the challenges of user response monitoring, and it shows how you can overcome these challenges and start to get a real handle on your infrastructure performance and how it impacts your users’ experience."

Today’s customer and employee profiles look very different than they did just a few years ago. These tech-enabled, highly connected buyers are using many different platforms to research, shop and work. They’re engaging brands in new ways—through social networks, as well as mobile and cloud-based applications. And with all their newfound capabilities, they’re expecting more from their business interactions.

This ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) whitepaper examines why unified IT monitoring is an important enabling technology for both enterprises and management service providers, including both the organizational and strategic impacts as well as the business case surrounding it. It goes further to examine CA Nimsoft Monitor as an example of unified IT monitoring, and reviews three case studies where the solution has been deployed for active use in a unified manner.