IT operations (ITOps) teams deal with constantly changing and increasingly complex technical landscapes due to the acceleration of technical innovation and company mandates for cloud transformation and IT modernization. Sometimes they are tasked with finding and fixing issues amid an ocean of data. The ocean doesn’t stay still. Storms blow in and out. Clear skies and calm days transform to rough waves and back again.
The metaphysical poet, Rumi, said: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” It’s a wonderful quote about how we interpret a large and beautifully complex world. Does it relate to IT troubleshooting? Well, not exactly.
Rumi said this several centuries ago. As prescient as he was, it’s doubtful that he could imagine IT, let alone the demands on siloed teams troubleshooting across multiple dashboards. But, if we consider the quote just as we would if we were looking across a seemingly infinite ocean as it disappears on the horizon, parallels emerge.