Forget “Mean Time to Innocence” and switch to collaborative problem solving

Mean Time to Innocence (MTTI) is a concept used a lot in discussions of network and IT performance. But what does it mean?

Fundamentally, MTTI is about proving that your product or tools are not to blame when something goes wrong somewhere. By ruling out one area, the organization can then focus its efforts more fully on the remaining culprits. Accelerate MTTI and you’re therefore well on your way to speeding up Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).

The symptoms of “Mean Time To Innocence” syndrome

This is especially important given that siloed internal teams can be more competitive than cooperative. You may find that:

• The network team wants to prove that it is not the network
• The virtualization team wants to prove that it is not the virtualization infrastructure
• The systems team wants to prove that it is not the fault of IT systems
• The application team wants to prove that it is not the application
• The database team wants to prove that it is not the database
• The storage team wants to prove that it is not the storage

When an issue occurs, every team will look to their own tools and search briefly for the usual suspects:

• Connection, retransmission, TCP lifecycle issues
• Incorrect resource assignations, overloaded hosts, virtual machine moving issues
• Incorrectly applied software updates, outdated policies, driver or firmware issues
• Database workloads, SQL errors, slow queries
• Application errors, slow application response times, resource consumption issues
• I/O saturations, read/write policy balancing, caching mechanism issues

What follows is usually an uncomfortable meeting where each team is trying to prove its own innocence and pin the blame on another, sometimes arbitrarily. At the end everyone has claimed innocence, but the underlying issue remains unfixed. In these situations, IT workers unfortunately forget that the real priority is to provide an optimized service for customers, not to dodge personal responsibility and shift blame onto others.

From blame to cooperation

So what’s the answer? To shift corporate culture away from troubleshooting based on apportioning blame, to one predicated on the notion of cooperation, so that everyone is pulling together to make things work again as quickly as possible. 

How can we achieve that? In the old days it was about analyzing packets to see what the problem was. However, this approach is no longer fit-for-purpose given the huge amounts of data generated by 10GB per second, 40GB or even 100GB links. Also, if you want your teams to cooperate, you need a tool that is not designed solely for network experts. Show TCP headers to a DBA expert and you might as well be speaking to them in a foreign language.

Instead, Accedian provides objective information in the form of wire data analytics automatically computed from network packets. Skylight monitors network traffic, collecting data on network usage  and performance, end-user experience and application transactions exchanged over physical, virtual, cloud and software-defined networks.

Thanks to this unique, real-time analysis, we can provide actionable information from a single tool to help drive collaboration across teams. It’s  powerfully simple information, available at the click of a button for different roles:

• Network engineers have all the metrics they need to pinpoint network issues
• Application developers have handy performance and troubleshooting metrics
• Database managers can identify errors or slow transactions in minutes
• Managers have clear reports to demonstrate the effectiveness of the their projects

Delivering consistent and reliable network and application performance across your IT infrastructure is a real challenge. Accedian helps IT and security departments to prevent and solve performance degradations faster in a collaborative way thanks to proactive end-user experience, network, and application performance monitoring.

Easy-to-understand, objective data provides a common understanding across IT teams of where and why problems occur and how applications behave, driving dramatic improvements to overall IT service delivery. In the process, can help to transform IT culture to one of information sharing and collaboration, with long-term benefits for customers and the bottom line.