IT Event Management Drives More Value When Integrated with Other ITSM Practices, According to New Info-Tech Research Group Blueprint

The firm outlines how a properly engineered event management process allows organizations to more effectively monitor and understand their IT environment.

TORONTO, March 13, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - As technology continues to evolve, organizations are finding it increasingly challenging to manage their modern and intricate IT environments. One of the main difficulties IT departments face is the identification and timely resolution of incidents within their infrastructure. These incidents can vary in severity from minor issues such as software bugs to major outages that can impact critical business operations resulting in extended periods of downtime and lost productivity. To help organizations implement a more effective IT event management strategy and ensure timely incident resolution, global IT research and advisory firm Info-Tech Research Group has published its industry blueprint, Engineer Your Event Management Process.

Info-Tech's blueprint emphasizes the importance of implementing event management to reduce the response time of technical teams dealing with incidents that degrade system performance. However, most organizations are unprepared for and face challenges in building an integrated event management practice where developers, service desk, and operations can all rely on event logs and metrics. Further, organizations find defining the scope of event management challenging, including identifying which systems to track, operational conditions, related configuration items, and associated actions of the tracked events.

The research blueprint indicates two additional obstacles to building an effective event management process. The first is the reduced visibility of on-premises tools due to the rise of managed, subscription, and cloud services. The second is the complexity of modern systems, which makes it difficult to determine the true cause and effect of any issues that arise.

"Trying to organize a catalog of IT events is difficult when working from the bottom up," says Benedict Chang, senior advisory analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. "It is recommended organizations start with the business drivers of event management to keep the scope manageable."

The firm's research explains that in event management, every step, from choosing which events to monitor to actioning the events when detected, must be purposeful and explicit. Event management must be integrated into the service management environment to inform and drive the appropriate actions.

To help organizations track monitored events purposefully and respond effectively, Info-Tech suggests clearly defining a limited number of operational objectives that may benefit from event management. The firm also recommends organizations focus only on the key systems whose value is worth the effort and expense of implementing event management. Further, writing a data retention policy that balances operational, audit, and debugging needs against cost and data security needs is crucial.

Info-Tech's new blueprint highlights that event management cannot happen in isolation and that its goals must come from the pain points of other IT service management practices. Therefore, event management must inform and build handoffs to other service management practices to drive the proper action when an event is detected; these practices include:

Logging, Archiving, and Metrics: Monitoring and event management can be used to establish and analyze a baseline. The more organizations know about their system baselines, the easier it will be to detect exceptions.

Change Management: Events can inform necessary changes to stay compliant or to resolve incidents and problems. However, it does not mean that changes can be implemented without the proper authorization.

Automatic Resolution: The best use case for event management is for it to automatically detect and resolve incidents and problems before end users or IT teams are even aware.

Incident Management: Events sitting in isolation are useless if there is no effective way to pass potential tickets off to incident management to mitigate and resolve them.

Problem Management: Events can identify problems before they become incidents. However, organizations must establish proper data logging to inform problem prioritization and actioning.

Ensuring that event management has open lines of communication and actions tied to related practices enables efficient action when needed. Therefore, Info-Tech advises that IT leaders must note that event management is a group effort, with integration with other management practices driving more value.

To learn more about the research and recommendations, download the complete Engineer Your Event Management Process blueprint.

For more information about Info-Tech Research Group or to access the latest research, visit infotech.com and connect via LinkedIn and Twitter.

Info-Tech Research Group is one of the world's leading information technology research and advisory firms, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals. The company produces unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. For 25 years, Info-Tech has partnered closely with IT teams to provide them with everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

Media professionals can register for unrestricted access to research across IT, HR, and software and over 200 IT and Industry analysts through the ITRG Media Insiders Program. To gain access, contact [email protected].

SOURCE Info-Tech Research Group