Monitoring the pulse of IT

Opsview Development Team

5 reasons why you need IT monitoring

All enterprises depend on secure, reliable servers, network devices and business applications. Any downtime hits your bottom line. To ensure maximum IT performance across your business, you have to identify and resolve problems before they impact the user experience or security of your data.

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To diagnose reliability and performance problems on complex networks you need visibility of system events combined with the ability to spot trends and exceptions. For example, without proactive IT monitoring how can you tell whether poor application performance is related to network congestion, database performance or a high number of users?

Here are five reasons why you need better network and application visibility:

1.    To maximise your return on network investments for business application delivery
All businesses invest heavily in setting up and maintaining their IT infrastructure whether it be physical, virtualised or in the Cloud. Effective capacity planning allows you to target your spending wisely and track your return on investment. IT monitoring gives you instant access to the data you need for trend analysis and provides data warehouse capability suitable for enterprise reporting and capacity planning.

2.    To anticipate and resolve issues before they’re problems
Knowing when there is a problem with your IT systems can be useful but anticipating problems before they occur is the real value of system monitoring. IT monitoring gives you the visibility needed to spot performance and capacity issues before they have an impact on your systems. It can also process alarms from network, storage, power and cooling infrastructure ensuring you can mitigate the effects of failing hardware.

3.    Make your staff more effective
The biggest asset for any business is its staff, also usually this is the biggest cost. Adoption of effective IT monitoring tools shifts the focus of your staff from fire-fighting to forward-planning. A project-based approach is more time efficient and allows you to focus the talents of your staff more effectively.

4.    To ensure quality and service levels
Maintaining quality of service requires visibility. Performance issues can remain hidden to the business while quietly eroding the confidence of customers and partners. IT monitoring exposes current problems and gives you the tools for long terms analysis and reporting. It provides service level reporting, providing clear evidence that you’re meeting the required service levels.

5.    Move things forward!
System monitoring is the cornerstone of IT management best practice. By adopting IT monitoring you’re making immediate efficiency gains and you’re laying the foundation for even greater levels of automation, scalability and resiliency.

About the author

James Peel is Opsview's Product Manager. He has over fifteen year's experience in IT systems management and has been working on the Opsview project since 2003.

Opsview is an award-winning IT network and application monitoring platform based on open source components that delivers control on an enterprise scale. Its outstanding combination of ease-of-use with a distributed, standards-based architecture has attracted enterprise customers including Ericsson, Microsoft, Allianz, Electronic Arts, Trinity Mirror, Plusnet, University of Surrey, Cambridge University Press and the Irish Revenue. For more information on Opsview visit www.opsview.com


Tags: cloud, it monitoring, network, opsview, virtualisation

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