Today, I am doing a webinar for Ziff Davis and IBM. The subject is Smart IT Tool Management Strategies. As I was preparing the slides, I got to reflect on the evolution of network and server monitoring technologies over the past two decades. It has gone from very basic server and OS monitoring, over dial up lines that report to really simple text based consoles, to very sophisticated application and transaction monitoring that reports to complex graphical consoles.

These tools evolved like everything in IT to meet the new demands of users and business being conducted faster than ever. Cloud computing, an environment where we don’t own or control all the IT assets, is putting a whole new set of pressures on IT management. Customers are becoming more familiar with the concept of Service Level Agreements, and now, know more about what they need to demand in an SLA.

Many of the traditional IT management problems remain, one of which is the multiple panes of glass, because we still have to use so many specialized point products for particular problems. Cohesive integration of all these tools would be nice. But I don’t see that happening for a long while.