IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview: Beyond IT Silos – A Better Way to Manage Monitoring

For a long time corporations have done and continue to create large scale processes by putting related types of logs and metrics into purpose built databases. These “data silos” often contains the organizational logs and metrics of the IT stack including application, network and storage data goes here, etc. Silos serve an important, rather obvious function for the commodities industry. They enable the storage of commodities. Silos optimize for costs and efficiency since the value of the commodity is in its volume, or bulk–not an individual piece of data.

In this interview, Gabby Menachem, CEO and founder of Loom Systems, speaks with IT Briefcase on going beyond IT silos to better manage application monitoring.

• Q. Do Data Silos work?

A. From a corporate perspective, data silos increase costs, decrease efficiency and limit innovation. IT culture is rapidly evolving to a shared ownership model removing the organizational inertia to sharing data and ideas. When data is siloed, it actually creates unnecessary friction collaboration and problem solving across functional boundaries. Conversely, centralizing related logs and metrics can dramatically increase the value of the data by uncovering important patterns and correlating issues across the entire organizational IT stack.

• Q. Who benefits from silos?

A. In the world of modern applications, data silos of logs and metrics are definitely not a help to application developers and operators. So, who do they help? One clear answer is software vendors. You depend on their products to derive value from the data they house for you. These software products and services either empower you to gain value from your data. No more. The architecture of the modern application (micro services, containers, etc.) demands the free flow of data to connect the dots and form a complete picture. Cross-functional, empowered teams of the agile DevOps revolution don’t defer to functional boundaries when solving problems.

• Q. Does it make sense to use machine data analytics tools that operate in this same siloed way?

A. Manual data manipulation is not your friend. Any time you have to start renaming rows and columns and structuring your data over to a different system, you’re introducing not only delays in the timeliness of the data, but a huge potential for inadvertent errors and multiple versions of the truth. And even if you’ve managed to get a workable system of data sharing going on, the simple truth is that you’ve got a system rife with data silos and your data will never be integrated enough for truly significant, timely, and robust analysis. Data silos are usually an accident brought about when different departments implement various information systems that meet their specific needs. To them, the system they’ve chosen to use is everything they’ve ever wanted, but that may not be true to the corporation as a whole. More critically, while these individual systems may provide robust analysis within their own domain, they may miss interesting relationships between seemingly unrelated data points and entities. And because there is inevitably a human gatekeeper determining which key performance indicators are worth exporting and which ones are not, a significant amount of data is simply discarded as not relevant to the discussion at hand, even if it might hold the key to an interesting little relationship that leads to better profitability.

• Q. What does Loom Systems do to help overcome this challenge?

A. When you start working with truly integrated data, pulling logs and metrics from across your entire organization and feeding it into a tool like Loom systems that lets you see the big picture or narrow your scope to information specific to individual IT event or business processes, everyone wins. With Loom, IT teams and DevOps can go beyond standard log monitoring to get deeper insight for better, faster decision-making, reduced manual effort for IT staff, and more satisfied customers.

Gabby Menachem, CEO

Gabby brings over 15 years of technology innovation and entrepreneurship experience to Loom Systems. Gabby was previously co-founder and CTO of Voyager Analytics, a product that analyzes social network data with a range of customers that include leading financial institutions. Prior to that, Gabby served as GM and VP R&D in a microwave engineering startup.