Managing Infrastructure Upgrades and Changes

In today’s economic climate, the importance of managing upgrades and changes to the infrastructure has never been higher. Organizations must balance the growing needs of application and network performance with the infrastructure capabilities against the available resources to meet the needs of the end user. For most organizations, the days of overbuilding just to be safe are long history. Today’s environment requires IT organizations to get the most out of upgrades and changes to the network and application infrastructure.

In dealing with managing infrastructure upgrades and changes, there are three components that have different requirements and management needs.

• Planned upgrades are typically scheduled weeks or months in advance to meet the growing needs of the organizations. Examples include increasing bandwidth, migrating to MPLS, hardware refresh and new software deployments. The planned upgrades typically have the highest monetary cost and generally have the highest level of planning.
• Planned changes are normally “tweaks” to existing network and application infrastructure to improve service quality or performance. Examples include fine-tuning QOS settings, updating software versions and changing hardware operating systems. The planned changes typically fit within maintenance windows and should follow a change management process.
• Unplanned changes are similar to planned changes, but do not follow a defined process so all parties may not be aware of the changes. Examples include a department rolling out a new application and not informing all parties or a network engineer tweaking a router configuration to improve performance. The unplanned changes are typically made with best intentions but often cause the biggest problems because of less planning and implementation strategy.

As a result, organizations should follow best practices to ensure the infrastructure changes and upgrades improve overall service quality within the defined investment goals.

Key Issues

While virtually every change and update is intended to improve service quality and/or reduce the total cost of ownership, the vast majority of organizations lack the visibility to be proactive and quantify the improvement. Too often, IT departments are reactive in their approach to change and upgrades – waiting for problems or issues to occur and then trying to eliminate the cause. This approach greatly increases the risk of poor application and network performance by being behind the curve the majority of time.

A second key issue is understanding if a change is needed – and if one is made, quantifying the improvement and evaluating it against the cost of the upgrade or change. Many organization focus on qualitative accounts such as “performance is slow” or “the application isn’t working right” instead of quantifying the targeted goals, baselining the current performance and measuring the improvement after the change or upgrade. Without the quantifiable metrics of goals, baselines and current quality, managing change and infrastructure will remain a guessing game.

Approaches

Most companies typically follow a siloed approach to performance management based on department (application, network, server) or title (engineer, network manager or architect). Each group has a set of tools that focus on their individual needs and do not integrate across the entire organization. When there is a problem with service quality, the finger pointing begins between the application team, network group, hardware staff and service provider. The challenge with this approach is the nature of change – change is continuously occurring and can impact different criteria based on numerous criteria such as number of users, type of application and/or utilization.

The majority of legacy solutions focus on reactive troubleshooting or executive reporting which typically is either too deep or too broad to provide value across the entire organization. When dealing with managing infrastructure changes and upgrades, it becomes imperative to have a solution that can monitor the overall performance but also drill down to the individual components to identify the key attributes impacting the end-to-end performance. With multiple tools, organizations typically waste a lot of time and effort in blaming other departments or trying to manually consolidate information across the complex components.

Best Practices

Since networks and requirements continuously evolve, there is no one “right” infrastructure upgrade or change for every organization. The key is defining the best practices to manage the planned upgrades, planned changes and unplanned changes across the infrastructure. In order to optimize overall service quality and maximize investment in upgrades and change, the best practices increase the likelihood of success for infrastructure changes and upgrades. The best practices include:

• Understanding key parameters and baseline normal network behavior including usage, application performance and response time before changes are made
• Focusing where investments have the most value to satisfy the needs of end-users and the business
• Validating and quantifying the impact of change such as how well the change addressed the need of the business
• Justifying infrastructure changes and the return on investment
• Managing the day-to-day operations to ensure optimal performance and maximize payback.

As organizations focus more on the value of infrastructure changes, Fluke Networks provides comprehensive solutions that help enterprises meet the best practices. Instead of assuming an investment or change always has a positive effect, Fluke Networks provides the critical visibility throughout the entire lifecycle of infrastructure change for the organization.

Armed with a comprehensive view, users can maximize the value of infrastructure changes and upgrades and reduce the risk of unplanned or unknown consequences. Fluke Networks helps organizations deploy, solve, manage and optimize performance across both networks and applications when dealing with network infrastructure upgrades and changes.