By David Wagner, senior manager, product marketing - application management, SolarWinds

With so many companies born in the cloud generation, digitization is no longer an option for brick-and-mortar companies that hope to remain competitive in today's transforming business landscape. This move toward digitization can be a double-edged sword-brick-and-mortar businesses that must keep up in an era of web-based everything are tasked with digitizing their business, which involves taking all their traditional business processes and inter-relationships, and putting them into custom applications.

Although cloud-era companies have used custom apps since their organization's establishment, custom apps still create a host of difficulties-regardless of company type or tech environment. Issues will always arise, and it's not a matter of if an application will fail or break, it's a matter of when. Some issues are significant enough that they warrant all teams and domain experts to be remediated. If an issue is impacting the business directly, whether key business transactions are slow or revenue-intensive services are down, it may create the need for a ‘war room' type of all-hands-on-deck meeting.

The digital war room explained

When it comes to managing custom applications, the digital war room plays out a little less cleanly than an all-hands meeting might in non-IT departments. From ‘blame storming' to finger-pointing, digital war rooms are designed to solve problems, but instead often interrupt personnel and add one more thing to tech pros' ever-growing list of issues that require reactive attention.

A digital war room gathers all domain experts and IT teams for incident response to identify, troubleshoot, and provide solutions for key issues that are negatively impacting the business overall. At their core, digital war rooms are designed to solve problems, but they ignite blame storming when the issue does not have a clear root cause-which is often the case when managing and maintaining custom applications. A digital war room traditionally goes through a triage process, where teams start with a funnel at the top and start throwing out the things they know can't be the problem and working from there. But, without tools that are ‘talking' to one another, this is a manual process-and that's when blame storming comes into play. With blame storming, teams point fingers and play the ‘blame game'- with the ultimate goal of only proving that it wasn't their fault.

Digital war rooms cause huge personnel disruptions as they take tech teams and experts away from the core elements of their jobs-they can't spend several hours per day working to resolve issues while also keeping the businesses they support running successfully.

Avoid entering the digital war room battlefield

The reactive nature of digital war rooms makes it difficult to be proactive. IT teams should prioritize integrating tools that enable continuous monitoring of both application performance and backend infrastructure and events management, to help avoid situations that cause them to be reactive, and ultimately engage in more proactive activities that will help them avoid these types of situations in the future.

Implementing the right tools can enable tech teams to look at response time, see it degrading, and do something about it before it becomes a service-impacting event that requires a digital war room to identify and solve the problem. The tools should also be equipped to track from both directions-meaning the events teams and app owners should be able to monitor infrastructure and events and app performance to pinpoint the root cause of issues faster and solve for the performance and latency issues.

In an ideal world...

Ideally, IT teams and leaders should start by understanding the actual performance, availability and experience of users, so that if (and when) issues arise, they can bring the data together to solve the problems effectively. So, the most ‘successful' player here will implement tools to understand the performance and availability of critical web apps from the point of view of the users, and be simultaneously monitoring the performance of all the underlying infrastructure and apps themselves (wherever they are running, both inside or outside the firewall) and constantly integrating that data in a related fashion with all incidents and events as reported by their logging solution.

Streamline time to resolution

If the need to enter into a digital war room arises, there are some best practices for decreasing the amount of time spent resolving the issues. Three top tips to help cut down time to resolution include:

• Understand that correlation is not causation: Just because things happen at the same time, does not mean they're directly related-especially in hybrid and highly dynamic environments. Without the right tools to reveal the root cause of the incident, it's nearly impossible to ascertain.

• Avoid blame storming: Although it's human nature to not want to be the cause of an issue, blame storming has the adverse effect of what a digital war room is intended to accomplish. This is very true in classic IT operations, where there are both on-premises and hybrid technologies- and teams- and no tool that brings them all together.

• Work toward a common goal: Some teams or individuals make it their #1 goal in a digital war room to prove that the issue was not their fault, so they can leave the war room as quickly as possible. Not only is this detrimental to the purpose of the digital war room, but it's a business problem as well; if an issue is significant enough that it warranted a digital war room, all teams should do everything in their power to work toward the common goal of resolution and getting business running as usual once again.
  

Closing thoughts

Every member of an organization is ultimately working toward a common goal: keeping the business running successfully and achieving business growth. Implementing the right set of tools can help tech pros avoid having to enter digital war rooms, but if they do have to enter the battlefield, remembering that they're all ultimately on the same team can help decrease the amount of time spent in a war room and time to resolution for issues that impact the business at large.

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About the Author

Dave Wagner is a senior manager of product marketing at SolarWinds with over 20 years of experience focused on IT performance and optimization. In his current role, Dave works closely with product management and corporate marketing to ensure alignment in go-to-market strategy and messaging for the SolarWinds application performance monitoring (APM) products. Prior to joining SolarWinds, Dave served as CTO of OpsDataStore, business development principal for TeamQuest, and vice president, marketing and sales at Solution Labs Inc.