According to Info-Tech Research Group’s new blueprint, IT event management creates more value when integrated with other ITSM practices

The company describes how a properly developed event management process allows organizations to monitor and understand their IT environment more effectively.

TORONTO, March 13, 2023 /PRNewswire/ – As technology continues to evolve, organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to manage their modern and complex IT environments. One of the main difficulties IT departments face is identifying and resolving incidents within their infrastructure in a timely manner. The severity of these incidents can vary from minor problems, such as software bugs, to major outages that can disrupt critical business operations and result in prolonged 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 released its Industry Roadmap. Design 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 affecting system performance. However, most organizations are unprepared and face challenges in building an integrated event management practice where event logs and metrics can be trusted by developers, service desk and operations. Additionally, organizations find it difficult to define the scope of event management, including identifying the systems being tracked, operating conditions, associated configuration items, and associated actions of the events being tracked.

The research plan points to two additional barriers 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 reason is the complexity of modern systems, which makes it difficult to determine the true cause and effect of problems that arise.

“Trying to organize a catalog of IT events is difficult when you’re working from the bottom up,” says Benedict ChangSenior Advisory Analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. “It’s recommended for companies to start with the business drivers of event management to keep the scope manageable.”

The company’s research explains that in event management, every step, from selecting which events to monitor to responding to the events when they are detected, must be targeted and unambiguous. Event management needs to be integrated into the service management environment to inform and drive appropriate action.

To help organizations track and effectively respond to monitored events, Info-Tech suggests clearly defining a limited set of operational objectives that can benefit from event management. The company also advises organizations to focus only on those key systems whose value is worth the effort and expense of implementing event management. Additionally, it is critical to write a data retention policy that balances operational, auditing, and debugging requirements against cost and data security requirements.

Info-Tech’s new blueprint emphasizes that event management cannot be done in isolation and that its goals must come from the pain points of other IT service management practices. Therefore, event management needs to inform other service management practices and build handoffs to take the right actions when an event is detected; These practices include:

Logging, archiving and metrics: Monitoring and event management can be used to set and analyze a baseline. The more organizations know about their system baselines, the easier it is to spot exceptions.

Change management: Events can inform about necessary changes to remain compliant or to resolve incidents and problems. However, this does not mean that changes can be made without the appropriate authorization.

Automatic resolution: The best use case for event management is to automatically identify and resolve incidents and problems before end users or IT teams even notice.

Incident Management: Isolated events are useless if there is no effective way to escalate potential tickets to Incident Management for mitigation and resolution.

Problem management: Events can identify problems before they become incidents. However, organizations must establish proper data logging to inform issue prioritization and action.

Ensuring events management has open lines of communication and actions linked to related practices allows for efficient action when needed. As such, Info-Tech advises that IT leaders must recognize that event management is a group effort, with integration with other management practices adding more value.

To learn more about the research and recommendations, download the full Design your event management process Draft.

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

About the Info-Tech Research Group

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 informed decisions. For 25 years, Info-Tech has worked closely with IT teams to provide them with everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, to ensure they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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SOURCE Info-Tech Research Group