From Big Data to Operational Intelligence – Are You Making the Most of Machine Data?

April 9, 2018

Log files, time-series data, big data. Whatever you choose to call it, machine data is one of the most underused and undervalued assets of any organisation.

But some of the most important insights you can gain – across IT and the business – are hidden in this data: where things went wrong, how to optimise the customer experience, the fingerprints of fraud. All these insights can be found in the machine data that’s generated by the normal operations of your organisation.

If you think about it, machine data contains a definitive record of all the activity and behaviours of customers, users, transactions, applications, servers, networks and mobile devices. It includes configurations, data from APIs, message queues, change events, output from diagnostic commands, sensor data from industrial systems…. the list goes on, and on.

Find a way to harness these insights and the resulting operational intelligence gleaned from machine data to monitor, streamline and improve how IT infrastructure and applications perform. That includes monitoring and responding to security related events.

Get more from your machine data – the recipe for intelligent operations

Holding critical information on user behaviour, security risks, capacity consumption, service levels, customer experience, fraudulent activity and more, machine generated data is the by-product of the digital enterprise.

Indeed, you could say machine data is the ‘digital exhaust’ that’s created by the systems, technologies and infrastructure that power today’s modern businesses.

Little wonder then that many forward-thinking organisations are already starting to use machine learning, data mining and event analytics to proactively monitor critical services in real-time. Detecting patterns and dynamically adapting thresholds to optimise application and infrastructure performance, quality and cost.

Mastering the machine data challenge

The challenge with leveraging machine data is that it comes in a dizzying array of unpredictable formats. Until now, traditional monitoring and analysis tools weren’t designed for the variety, velocity, volume or variety of this data.

But today’s next generation advanced technology platforms make it easy to capture, monitor and analyse machine data from any source across the enterprise. Providing powerful search, analysis and visualisation services that enable you to monitor and respond to events in real-time, and in some cases, automatically through machine learning.

It’s a disruptive approach that makes it possible to:

Monitor network infrastructure performance and avoid costly network escalations or downtime
Monitor and react to security issues based on system or user behaviour
Automated auditing and process to meet compliance and governance requirements
Map critical services with KPIs to pinpoint what matters most
Understand trends, patterns of activity and behaviours for customers, transactions and systems
Gain a centralised unified view of critical IT services

According to McKinsey, the impact of operational intelligence is set to be a game-changer, impacting the enterprise in several ways.

Clearly, it benefits IT leaders, who can evaluate the health of assets and systems in real-time and respond fast to operational limits and failures, automating many time-consuming tasks that detract internal IT resources from more strategic activities.

But, when combined with business data sources, it supports the optimisation of key business operations to drive enhanced customer experiences.

We think its one of the most exciting technology initiatives to emerge in recent years. And those organisations that get to grips with the potential on offer are likely to steam ahead of the rest of the field when it comes to making smarter decisions.

So…are you fully maximising the power of your data? Get in touch with us below if you would like to hold a whiteboard session, master your machine data and improve business outcomes.

Get In Touch

Contact Q Associates today if you have any questions or would like to discuss your IT requirements in more detail. Tel: 01635 248181 Email: Info@qassociates.co.uk