To ensure the availability of high performance, mission critical IT services, IT departments need both solid monitoring capabilities and dedicated IT resources to resolve issues as they occur. But even with the right tools in place, when an abundance of alerts and alarms start streaming in, it can quickly become overwhelming , particularly when IT staff have been asked to focus time and attention on activities that both support the organization’s end users and add to the company’s bottom line.
Logicalis US suggests that organizations need to ask the following five key questions to help ensure that enterprise IT monitoring is fit for purpose:
1. Is your monitoring tool configured properly? Most organizations have off-the-shelf monitoring tools that gather information from all of the devices on their network. The information coming from these tools can be overwhelming, and while it may be helpful to have access to all of that data, weeding through it in crunch-time can be cumbersome. To limit alerts to those that are most important takes training, knowledge and expertise, which leads many organizations that want to manage IT monitoring in house to employ full-time experts just to configure and manage their monitoring tools.
2. Do you update regularly? Since rules are continually being added to monitoring tools, monitoring isn’t an ‘implement and forget it’ situation, which means IT departments spend a considerable amount of time making sure the tools they depend on for alerts are as current and up-to-date as possible.
3. Can your tool provide event correlation? A single network error can have a ripple effect impacting applications that would otherwise be completely unrelated. As a result, it’s critical that an IT monitoring tool provide event correlation to speed diagnosis and remediation in all affected areas.
4. Does your monitoring tool offer historical trending data? When managing an enterprise environment, IT pros need to analyze historical trend data to identify recurring issues as well as to do capacity planning which, in many cases, can help prevent issues before they arise. Some of today’s popular monitoring tools, however, either operate in real time or store historical data for 30 days or less. Knowing what your tool offers is important information since being able to intelligently analyze and manage an organization’s IT environment can depend on having access to this historical data long term.
5. Do you have the right expertise in house? In an enterprise IT environment, it’s important to consider internal staffing needs and the expertise required to manage the monitoring tools and process in house. Keeping an enterprise environment up and running is no longer IT’s value-add; it’s an expectation. Today, most organizations want their IT staff delivering business results, which is why it may make sense to consider outsourcing monitoring to a third party skilled in assessing and limiting incident reports to only the handful that a busy internal staff actually needs to address.
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