A while ago, I heard a friend complain that they were engaged in the digital transformation of operation and maintenance, but instead of feeling that the work was easy, they were exhausted all day. Because of the digital transformation, they introduced Prometheus, and found a lot of plug-ins from the Internet to connect all kinds of monitorable components in the company to Prometheus monitoring. It is also connected to the log platform, and the logs of application servers and databases are accessed. After tossing for more than half a year, it finally came to an end.
The results of this period are also very gratifying, because in the past, there were not many things monitored by the IT department, and it was completely managed by people. Many things have to be operated manually, because the number of systems is relatively large, so the management is relatively rough, as long as the business department does not complain, the system is not down, and basically no one cares. Therefore, more than a dozen people from various specialties in their operation and maintenance department can still cope with it. During this period of time, I was on the monitoring, accessed thousands of O&M objects, and I was tired and half dead, and finally stopped. After the system is monitored, it is indeed much more convenient than before, and some daily manual inspection work can also be completed with the help of the system.
However, the good times did not last long, and after the leaders saw the results of the first stage, they immediately carried out the work of improving quality and efficiency. Now the problem is big, the logs have been collected, you always have to analyze and analyze whether there is a problem, the data has been collected, the alarm baseline has been done, the alarms generated every day must be analyzed and analyzed, closed-loop management must be the leader's favorite job, and the day may mean that the report cannot be written.
After a user got on our D-SMART, their leader also learned to read the running status of databases, middleware, etc., so he often logged in to the system to check the health score and unrecovered alarms. Once you see that the health status of a system is yellow, or there are serious alarms that have not been answered in the alarm, you will immediately ask the front-line personnel to check and analyze them to achieve closed-loop management. In fact, many problems are not necessarily immediately solved, but the leaders do not care about them. So they had to adjust the model so that the health score was at least in the green range, and the alarm could only be lowered so that it didn't appear on the monitoring alarm console.
In addition, after the digital transformation, is there a problem of whether the running status has been improved, is it necessary to make a weekly summary? Some things can only be found from the Internet to output some analysis results, and some things that really can't be found can only be read by hand. After the improvement of the department's digital management capabilities, it seems that there is more work, and it is not clear whether the first two words of the four words of improving quality and efficiency have been achieved, and the last two words do not seem to exist. Therefore, he doubts whether the digital transformation of O&M can truly improve quality and efficiency.
In fact, many enterprises engage in digital transformation, without fundamentally considering the purpose of digital transformation, but as a political task. If we don't understand the underlying logic of digitalization to improve quality and efficiency, we can't figure out the effect of improving quality and efficiency. Digital construction is not a great leap forward, it must be based on the foundation of the previous informatization, through the development of informatization, lean, automation, and intelligence, in order to truly complete the digital transformation. Through lean management, the introduction of automation tools, and the use of intelligent means to assist analysis, the management tentacles can be extended to places that could not be reached before, and the scope of management of the operation and maintenance department can be greatly expanded, so as to achieve the purpose of improving quality. Through automated and intelligent means, a large number of autonomous driving is realized, unmanned attendance, and automatic data collection and analysis. In this way, a lot of front-line operation and maintenance personnel's workload can be saved, so as to achieve the purpose of increasing efficiency. Improving quality and efficiency must achieve the goal at the same time, in order to be sustainable and to truly achieve quality and efficiency.
Many enterprises owe too much debt in the informatization stage of IT operation and maintenance, and if they want to achieve digital transformation, they must first make up all the debts. In fact, the digital transformation of O&M also needs to be carried out step by step, and if you go too fast, it is easy to get caught in the egg.
In today's example, they introduced Prometheus and the logging platform to connect all the systems that used to rely on manual operation and maintenance, and collected all the data, which is a pretty good job. However, this part of the work only makes up for the debt of informatization and paves the way for digital transformation. Leaders mistakenly regard these preliminary tasks as the core work of digital transformation, so after completing these tasks, they can't wait to manage and engage in KPIs. Indeed, leaders are not engaged in technology, and only when they see KPIs can they be considered results, so they are often too urgent.
After the digital transformation, the operation and maintenance department may face dozens of times or hundreds of times more data than in the past, so data processing must be automated and intelligent. Many enterprise leaders only see the improvement of management capabilities brought about by digitalization, but ignore that digitalization should first improve production methods and productivity, and improve the quality and efficiency of front-line work. Front-line work must be more efficient with the help of digital work to achieve quality improvement. Only when efficiency is improved and quality is improved, can management be able to rise.
However, many enterprises often lack patience, after completing the work of the digital collection stage, enterprises should increase investment, introduce automated and intelligent means to process data, build various models and algorithms, and turn some of the work that originally needs to be done manually by front-line personnel into digitization and automation, so as to liberate front-line personnel from heavy data collection, data statistics, data analysis and other work. In this way, front-line personnel can have more time to participate in the improvement of KPIs.
The main reason for this situation is that the starting point and purpose of the digital transformation of operation and maintenance of these enterprises are wrong, and they do not start from solving the problems of front-line production, but from the perspective of management. In doing so, front-line personnel are not benefiting from digitalization, but are exhausted by numbers. Unfortunately, the digital transformation of O&M for many enterprises is taking this completely wrong route.