IT monitoring and analytics

What gets measured gets done. Without the proper system monitoring tools and IT monitoring software, many things can happen that start as small issues but can quickly turn into large headaches. This is true for all sizes of business, whether it be small business or enterprise monitoring. These monitoring tools are designed to make things easy by automating the collection and analysis needed to provide you with up-to-the-minute information that will help keep your systems and infrastructure running smoothly. What truly differentiates many solutions is that they also come with intelligence built in to begin detecting erroneous or even malicious activity within your systems. Such activity can ultimately lead to downtime or data loss, which can have a negative effect on your customer’s confidence and overall trust in your system’s abilities to meet security and availability goals.

When it comes to monitoring tools and IT monitoring software in general, there are a few key table stakes that are requisite when choosing a solution:

• Ability to monitor 24.7.365 — Your business and/or your data most likely works all hours of the day, every day of the year. Without up-to-the-minute monitoring, you cannot stay aware of the pitfalls that potentially await your next move. You already know that things rarely go wrong when you are in front of the administrator console; more often than not, things go wrong when you are sleeping soundly in bed. It is important to have a strong IT monitoring solution ready to catch the things that go bump in the night.
• Proactive alerting — So you are monitoring every minute of every day, but now what? A key capability for monitoring tools and IT monitoring software is that they can proactively make you aware of erroneous or malicious activity taking place when it is just starting and not after something bad has already happened. System monitoring tools that have proactive alerting will increase your chances of avoiding disaster and reduce your time to resolution when solving both common and complex problems.
• Intelligent remediation — You have chosen your system monitoring tools. Great! You are now monitoring and have proactive alerting to keep you up to date and ready to spring into action. But what about those things that go bump in the night? What about those annoying problems that are common and can be easily resolved? In the world of backup and recovery, enterprise monitoring across your backup infrastructure with intelligent remediation can help solve the most common backup problems: human error, media failure, network failure and hardware failure. Using known fixes or preconfiguring behavior that happens when a common problem offends a policy is the ONLY way that you can ensure that your jobs run without fail and your data is protected and ready for recovery when and where you need it most.

Server monitoring at its core helps keep you up to date by reviewing, analyzing and reporting on processes that impact overall operations, including security, availability and general health. However, system monitoring tools are important for more than just ensuring that they are adequately serving their applications and users. In addition to monitoring applications’ availability and responsiveness, storage is closely monitored to provide you with warnings when data is nearing storage thresholds or underperforming. In addition, IT monitoring software can help you understand additional items that could affect overall performance. These items include CPU and memory usage, general storage availability and overall responsiveness of systems that support applications relied on by your business. Just like with proactive alerting, server monitoring also helps with backups by keeping you up to date with information on which systems could impact or reduce your server’s health and ability to meet the goals of your Modern Data Protection strategy.