On the "Kung Fu" of IT Operation and Maintenance

One day, Master Ma was walking on the street and saw the words "Huashan" among the green grass and red flowers. He closed his eyes slightly and began the peak moment of the duel with the martial arts masters... Ma Yun's "Kung Fu" tells a story about Tai Chi.

So why is it called "Kung Fu" instead of Tai Chi? Even those who have seen it may not understand that Master Ma's Kung Fu is not a new type of martial arts, but the use of Kung Fu to protect the people, things, and objects that one wants to protect. Speaking of this, IT operations also have the "business" that needs to be protected the most.

"Pre-event management" is not just a slogan, troubleshooting is like "group crosstalk"

It is always a challenge to ensure the stable operation of key businesses, take preventive measures and not turn "pre-emptive management" into a slogan!

This is because, during the operation and maintenance of business systems, IT personnel will encounter various confusions, including many factors such as the business system itself, between business systems, and outside the business system.

Will the business system itself have problems? Faced with such problems, many operation and maintenance personnel will say: "Yes, there will be problems, and a lot of them." This is like a video conferencing system. The video transmission is unstable, intermittent, the screen is stuck, the screen is distorted, it is not smooth, and the audio and video are not synchronized. These problems may occur at any time during the meeting. However, due to the lack of problem analysis methods and tools, operation and maintenance personnel cannot understand the real-time status of the business. At the same time, due to the lack of unified business data correlation analysis, it is more difficult to locate the fault when they see it. Solving the problem only by "experience" is both time-consuming and labor-intensive.

The above are only the problems within the business system, not including the network attacks, violations, virus incidents, and unauthorized incidents outside the business system. Of course, if only the "internal and external" reasons are taken into account, the operation and maintenance personnel can barely maintain their operations, but once the problem occurs between business systems, the operation and maintenance scene will really become a "crosstalk".

Business A: Why haven’t you sent any data?

Business B: Boss, I have already sent the data, but you didn’t process it. What a pity!

Business C: Why don’t you send data at midnight every day?

Business D: Ah? I just upgraded my system, and no one told me there was this interface. I need to send you data? Ah?

It's too messy here, I want some quiet time!

The "Kung Fu" in the minds of operators: triple protection

In "Ma Yun's Three Cultivations", he once mentioned: "In Tai Chi, the three words I appreciate most are determination, following, and giving up.

"Determination" means to see yourself and the future trend clearly, and to face everything calmly no matter what happens; "following" means that only when you have the strength can you know how to follow others; "giving up" allows people to see themselves clearly, and only when you know what you want can you know what to give up."

If we open our minds and apply the "three cultivations" to the IT operation and maintenance field, it may help operation and maintenance personnel find their "gong shou dao". At the very least, we should "see ourselves and future trends clearly".

In this era of rapid development of IT technology, the early operation and maintenance methods that focused on basic equipment such as networks and servers are undergoing upgrades. More and more companies have shifted their focus from a single network to the current business system. Implementing and protecting all aspects of the business system has become the core of operation and maintenance work.

Based on the above needs, Beita Software launched BTDO, a new generation of intelligent operation and maintenance platform with business assurance as the core.

However, we will not talk about the performance and operation of this "hardware box" today (if necessary, read the product white paper to supplement your understanding). The "triple protection" embodied by BTDO is the key point.

• Self-diagnosis: internal operating status of the business system

Self-diagnosis means that the operation and maintenance system can automatically diagnose the hidden dangers of the business system, such as monitoring thousands of indicators such as software and hardware configuration, performance, and traffic in the business system, and reflect the reasons for the "stuck, disconnected, and slow" of the business system based on these indicators. And to understand it in the context of the "three repairs", it means "seeing yourself and the future trends clearly."

And the "see" here is very unique. It uses the "warning signs" in our daily life. The operation and maintenance personnel can see these warning signs very intuitively. At the same time, they use the operating status, traceability, correlation, analysis and other precise data covering the entire process of the business system to automatically locate the fault point.

• Self-learning: interface rules between business systems

With the continuous development and differentiation of corporate business, the interfaces of many business systems are becoming more and more complicated and coordination is becoming more and more difficult. In order to reduce mutual constraints, there is an urgent need for a unified and automated analysis tool, which is equivalent to a "robot" specifically responsible for monitoring interfaces.

Beita Software's approach is to use big data analysis and processing technology, combined with an "exclusive secret" business interface communication law algorithm, to automatically sort out the existing interfaces between businesses, automatically learn the interface communication laws between businesses, and automatically discover interface communication anomalies between businesses without human intervention.

• Self-identification: External security risks of business systems

What is the most valuable thing these days? Jack Ma once teased everyone that the answer is "data", and these data are in the core business systems of enterprises. Therefore, the ability to automatically identify external security risks of business systems, automatically monitor network traffic 24/7, and automatically trigger alarms when abnormal behaviors are discovered... These functions are extremely useful for operation and maintenance personnel.

For example: self-learning generates a business access whitelist, and once an unauthorized IP is found to access sensitive business, it will be "listed"; if there is abnormal business access traffic, or if the production and office areas are found to be secretly "dating" traffic, it will be "listed"; guard the protocol ports of key equipment, and if it is found that criminals have accessed the non-public protocol ports of key equipment, they will be "listed".

In conjunction with this 22-minute film "Kung Fu", we have talked so much about the concepts of IT operation and maintenance, and we just want to share with you colleagues: Operation and maintenance personnel must keep up with the times. What kind of "Kung Fu" should they do to "guard" their own "Tao"? This is an important question that we should constantly ask ourselves and strive to find the answer to.