LogicMonitor Gives C-Suite Execs a View of the Data Center They Can Understand

While there has never been a shortage of tools to help IT operations teams figure out what’s occurring inside the data center, only recently stakeholders outside the data center have started taking an interest. Now that it’s apparent the data center is the economic engine that makes the digital economy run, C-level executives want to know more about its inner workings.

To provide that capability, LogicMonitor, a provider of Software-as-a-Service applications for data center monitoring, has added an Executive Dashboards Suite that makes it easier for CIO, CTOs, and other C-level executives to visualize what’s happening inside the data center in real time at any given moment.

LogicMonitor CEO Kevin McGibben said that while the IT team needs access to more granular data, C-level executives want a view of the same data that enables them to discern overall performance and trends.

While not everyone in the IT operations team might welcome that additional level of scrutiny, McGibben said, providing more transparency into the data center ultimately winds up making it easier to get executive support for upgrades. Rather than having to make the case for those upgrades without any hard data to help justify the investment, the feature provides insight into data center performance in a way that C-level executives can easily correlate upgrades to events that have a material impact on the business.

“A lot of times the biggest issue that IT people have when trying to get funding is simply accessing the data,” said McGibben. “With LogicMonitor they can track what is happening on a per-minute basis.”

Here's a screenshot of the executive dashboard, courtesy of LogicMonitor:

Specifically, the suite provides widgets to track network and storage utilization; metrics such as CPU status in relation to peak performance; along with an overview of activities occurring in the network operations center.

In some cases, McGibben said it’s not unusual to find customers that have configured LogicMonitor dashboards for large displays hanging on a wall that every employee in the company can view, because the underlying dashboards are powered by a SaaS application.

Of course, the degree to which the C suite wants to have access to that level of information about what is occurring inside the data center depends on just how strategic IT is to their business. But in general, the less mystery there is surrounding the data center these days the more likely the business is to appreciate not only the value of that investment but also the expertise of the people that keep it running.