How to drive enterprise efficiency with Confluence Data Center.
When it comes to driving efficiency and effectiveness in your organization,
monitoring and reporting capabilities are your best friends. These capabilities are
what allow you to gain insight into how your teams are using their software.
Consider your current products and if they provide the right kind of data you need to answer questions, such as:
· Are my teams following the organization’s established best practices?
· What does my product’s performance look like?
· Can I report back to the executive team on our security and compliance position?
If the software that your organization relies on can’t help you answer questions like these, then they aren’t contributing to efficiency and effectiveness in
your enterprise.
Being an admin of a self-managed environment means that you are responsible
for the management of your entire instance. This includes data retention, scale,
performance, and end-user activity just to name a few things. On top of this, you
also have to deliver on aggressive business objects, break down organizational
silos, and establish consistent ways of working across the enterprise, that’s a
whole lot to manage when you can’t understand what’s actually happening in
your instance. That’s why having the right software that enables you to take
action is so important.
Gain insight with Data Center
Data Center, Atlassian’s self-managed enterprise edition, has advanced auditing capabilities, which allow you to create a digital record of what’s happening in your instance.
You can choose one of four different coverage levels (off, base, full, advanced) to
log different types of events, depending on the unique needs and insight that
your organization requires.
Advanced auditing is built with file externalization capabilities, which means
that you can integrate your Data Center products with third-party monitoring
tools, such as Splunk, Elastic Stack, Sumo Logic, or CloudWatch.
By leveraging file externalization, you can even use key features provided by your monitoring tools to gain even more insight into your events.
5 ways to become more efficient with advanced auditing
Be proactive rather than reactive
Up until recently, the IT strategy for most large organizations looked something
like this: One of your teammates is having trouble with their software. They
submit a ticket to IT to get help with their problem. At which point, the ticket
gets added to a queue until it’s assigned to someone on the team. Once the
ticket is assigned, someone on your IT team works on troubleshooting and
identifying the problem. After they’ve finally identified the problem and resolved
it, the issue is marked as done, but it took quite a bit of time to fix the problem.
Keep good instance hygiene
You may have already undergone a cleanup initiative within your organization
but that’s only half the battle. While it’s important to look critically at your
instance and clean up any old data or suboptimal configurations, if you don’t
have the monitoring or reporting capabilities to ensure that your teams are
using the products correctly, you’ll likely end up where you started. By looking
into your instance on a regular basis, you can maintain good instance hygiene.
You might be asking yourself what good instance hygiene is. It means you are
maintaining your cleanup efforts and upholding the practices that you’ve put in
place. However, old habits are hard to break and it can be challenging for teams
to change the way they work.
Maintain security and compliance
Security and compliance is a top priority for any enterprise or government
agency. Constantly changing external conditions like evolving regulations, the
rise of remote work, and globally distributed teams makes the security and
compliance of your instance an increasingly important initiative.
According to most compliance guidelines, you should be actively monitoring
changes in your system’s behavior and data flow, which requires that you
have products with 24/7 monitoring capabilities.
Depending on the coverage level that you specify, advanced auditing will log
security relevant events, such as all failed login attempts. If you’re leveraging
a third-party monitoring tool, you can set up anomaly detection to notify you
when there are changes to your security events or if a security event is logged
too many times in a row. You can rest assured that your instance will remain
secure and you can return it back to compliance.
Boost performance and capacity
The performance of your products is always a big concern, especially when you
have a globally distributed team. To get ahead of performance issues, you need
to track your product’s performance to understand how many people are using
your products and what they’re doing.
With Data Center’s advanced auditing, you can review trends in your data, such
as when your products experience higher user traffic or when the number of
new tickets or pages created increases. After you enable advanced auditing,
your last 10 million records are stored, which gives you a chance to review your
existing events and create a baseline. Then, you can integrate your monitoring
tools with your Data Center products to continue tracking your team’s activity
over time.
With this data now being tracked, your IT team can start to build out a plan
for better performance, which means that your teams will have their mission critical products available when they need them.
Focus on your business objectives
One of the most important reasons why monitoring and reporting are so crucial
to the admin of a self-managed environment is that it can help streamline
some of your day-to-day tasks. Modernizing your infrastructure and finding
ways to leverage newer technologies is often one of your business objectives,
but it’s impossible to really focus on modernizing your infrastructure if you’re
focused on manually monitoring events in your instance to stop problems from
impacting your teams.
Advanced auditing tracks your instance events in real-time. If you’ve integrated
with your monitoring tools, you can set triggers to notify you anytime there is a
change in your events.
By looking at your team’s activity, you can also get a better understanding of
how your teams are using their products and what changes you can make to
support them. If you’ve identified that you have a lot of user login events at a
particular time of day, you can start to find a modern solution that will allow
you to scale the infrastructure of your products.
Now that you’ve learned about five key areas where advanced auditing can
help you drive enterprise efficiency, let’s explore how advanced auditing will
help solve for common problems in Confluence. Contact Us
