IT leaders are continually challenged to understand the impact that resource changes have on their performance. As more businesses move to a distributed digital network, they gain access to more applications and customer expectations soar. Any organisation whose infrastructure doesn’t operate effectively risks isolating their customers and employees.
Misjudging the capacity of even just one application can create a bottleneck that slows down your entire system. Common resource bottlenecks are CPUs overloaded with requests and databases running multiple complicated queries.
When the data input is larger than (or even equal to) the application’s capacity, your infrastructure can no longer run optimally. The bottlenecks build up and get worse over time, draining resources and stunting business growth.
The Solution: Application Resource Management
Application Resource Management (ARM) collects system output data to assess your network’s internal operations. By capturing an image of real-time functionality, ARM predicts and dynamically allocates the optimal resources necessary for each component to run at its best.
The idea is to optimise resource distribution, so a key draw of ARM is its ability to prevent downtime across your entire network. Customer and employee satisfaction is inherently tied to operationality, where effective resource management is key.
Without ARM, IT teams must assess each component in your system individually. This is time-consuming and laborious. Busy IT teams can also occasionally risk incorrectly allocating resources in the hope of resolving performance bottlenecks, without the insight to know if it will actually help.
Other benefits of ARM are optimised cloud spend and reduced network and team inefficiencies. But, it needs to be handled effectively. Here’s how to make sure your ARM strategy is a success:
6 Steps to an ARM strategy that effectively reduces infrastructure bottlenecks
1. Tie in with business goals
To ensure cooperation between application and infrastructure teams, make sure everyone is on the same page. Cooperation between IT teams and key executives will ensure maximum value and ROI.
By aligning your ARM strategy with the wider business goals, you can ensure your team proves its value to key decision-makers. For instance, C-level executives care most about maximising sales, productivity and efficiency, and if ARM is not effective across the entire organisation, it is very likely that the business will be operating in a sub-optimal way.
2. Respond to concerns immediately
ARM is ineffective if developers don’t action the alerts the technology generates. Once your business and IT goals are aligned, you will know which concerns need to be prioritised. Build a response system into your ARM strategy to keep it tackling critical bottlenecks.
Depending on the tooling you use, you may be able to automate incident response to common or simple issues. This is ideal for busy teams wanting to offload responses to common or simple alerts.
3. Automate bottleneck identification and response
As well as streamlining response, automating your ARM allows you to identify concerns before they become fully-fledged problems. Automation frees up time spent on any tedious manual tasks, giving IT teams space to innovate and grow.
Automated ARM streamlines compliance and performance optimisation by giving you a steady flow of insights to prioritise. If in doubt on where to start here, the team at Advent One have a suite of tools and methodologies in infrastructure automation that will streamline performance optimisation.
4. Create a proactive resource allocation strategy
While ARM reduces the number of tickets, it’s up to your team to decide on action plans and respond to alerts. Some teams may prioritise automating remediation, while others may need to focus on software development.
As your ARM strategy develops, it will identify issues you weren’t previously aware of. Your teams must be dynamic and proactive, continually working alongside the technology or seeking support from an external provider, such as Advent One to manage any additional workloads.
5. Choose the right provider for your needs
There are a range of ARM providers on the market, each with varying specialities. Consider your business and IT infrastructure needs carefully when evaluating which is the best fit.
Advent One has partnerships with a range of leading technology providers, including Red Hat, IBM Turbonomic and Dynatrace. Using your chosen platform as a single source of truth, Advent One provides insight into your network capabilities and IT needs.
6. Engage an ARM manager to deal with the noise
Implementing ARM technology in-house presents the potential for generating noise that no one deals with. Advent One supports organisations with the need for ARM that don’t have the skill or resources to fully manage it themselves.
Using ARM to analyse your system’s output, we first take an overview of its internal state. With that information, we assess where application resources need to be redistributed, allowing our team to allocate them accordingly.
Come and see us at the Cloud and IT Infrastructure Summit
As Hybrid Cloud and Automation experts, Advent One is the ideal partner to optimise your cloud ROI and streamline your IT infrastructure operations. Our Application Resource Management experts bridge the gap between technology and team, helping you achieve your goals and optimise your cloud spend.
Come and see us at the Cloud and IT Infrastructure Summit to find out more about how Advent One makes Application Resource Management work for you. Our experts will be on hand to chat with anyone looking to optimise their cloud-based infrastructure and overcome resourcing bottlenecks.