Right-sizing is used in a business context to optimize the efficiency and output of an organization's workforce. It generally involves three steps:  

• Identifying organizational objectives

• Defining the right amount of people with the right skillsets

• Hiring, laying off, or training the workforce to achieve those objectives.

The same concept can be applied to your IT toolkit as well. If your teams don't have the right tools to perform their responsibilities, productivity would tank. At the same time, over-purchasing expensive IT solutions can also bleed your budget dry.

To right-size your IT toolkit, you can follow the same steps that we mentioned above.

• Set expectations for your IT teams. In the case of an NOC team, you can set an SLA of 99.999% availability for critical systems.

• Define the capabilities they would need to achieve this. For the NOC team, they might need to monitor critical IT systems at very short intervals. Keep in mind that along with critical devices like servers and routers, supporting IT systems like interfaces, distribution switches, and firewalls also need to be monitored- albeit at longer intervals.

• Purchase an IT tool with these capabilities and the right license. The NOC team needs a network monitoring solution that's licensed to monitor the critical IT systems and the non-critical supporting IT systems.

For IT tools, there is an additional fourth step.

• Opt for unified IT tools wherever possible. This is the equivalent of hiring a jack-of-all-trades who's talented in multiple fields of knowledge. A unified, vendor agnostic monitoring solution that can track the uptime, performance, and hardware health of the monitored devices would help the NOC team to perform faster troubleshooting.

You should right-size your IT toolkit to optimize IT effciency and productivity. This isn't a one-off, but a continuous process. As your network and requirements grow, you can perform timely license upgrades to ensure that your teams are best-equipped to manage your IT.

OpManager is designed with tiered pricing, editions, and add-ons that help you choose the exact license and functionalities that drive the most value for you. OpManager's editions can help you choose the features that you require, while in-product add-ons can help you unify more monitoring functionalities under a single console.

You can start the process of right-sizing your IT environment by writing to us anytime!

If you're using OpManager, you can read more about upgrades and request for a personalized upgrade quote here.