Not that expensive or difficult anymore
I have seen many extremely complex and costly Service Assurance or wider OSS implementations as they call it in the Telco industry... sometimes totally failing the main "Assurance" point.
We have since built through experience an approach and ready to roll-out methodology and toolset (open source based.. but really integrated slashing the TCO many times) to finally get to a point where user-level and platform monitoring can anticipate those dreaded user calls (the calls not the users of course). If there's a call, as said above, it is past the point of annoyance and it is affecting the business already... it means it is way too late and burning. For web applications at least, and even legacy ones, there is no excuse not to have at least something to learn from incidents and know exactly where to look over time.
If you put a bit of pragmatic IT Service Management methodology on top, IT engineers working life finally have a chance to stop scratching their heads figuring out when those seconds of response time started to become an issue.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
