Sentilla Blog

There's been a lot of discussion recently about the difference between monitoring and management.  This week, I received an email with the title "Revolutionizing Energy Management".  Interesting, I wonder what management solution this company provides for energy.  The content of the email went on to talk about a brand new meter that provides real time power load information.  While I'm sure this company's meter is very innovative (names purposely omitted to protect the innocent), it was clear that this company did not understand what the word "management" even means.

I'd like to point out the difference between management and monitoring.  There are a LOT of tools for monitoring but much fewer for management.

Monitoring is the process of being aware of the state of a system.  It involves observing the current situation and typically necessitates a measuring device or meter.  Monitoring typically results in a large set of data, un-correlated and un-analyzed.  The data is not tied to your business objectives but is just data, it is that simple.  It is up to you, as the human, to figure out what all this data means.

Management, in contrast, is the act of getting a system to deliver a desired goal/objective.  It involves managing and allocating resources, organizing resources to execute a task, designing and re-designing systems, and optimizing a system to produce useful outcomes.  Monitoring is a key component to management; after all you need credible information to make decisions.

Sentilla was at the Uptime Institute Symposium a few weeks back in Santa Clara, and we sponsored the event with our partner SAP.  We had a lot of great discussions, from government policy makers to data center managers of varying size enterprises to cloud providers and infrastructure vendors.

But the most impactful takeaway was from Christian Belady and Mike Manos.  They put it different ways, but ultimately there message was this: Instead of coming to the conference and saying "there's nothing new", come back next year and actually implement the improvements we've been talking about for the last 10 years!

You can see a snippet in Uptime's video from Mike Manos' presentation.