Systems Monitoring and Management Simplified

If You Can’t Monitor Performance, How Do You Manage It? Applications and infrastructure performance must be consistently and vigilantly monitored, and expertly managed to maintain business efficiencies and assurances that service level agreements (SLAs) are being met.

Unfortunately, with networks operating across numerous remote locations and business functions managed across a spectrum of platforms, services and applications, compiling comprehensive performance metrics regarding application and systems performance is difficult, costly and time consuming.

Analysis of systems has often required outsourcing number crunching and bringing in expensive consultants with systems integration and monitoring authority and expertise. Home-grown, systems-born scripts and inadequate monitoring solutions simply don’t provide the level of utility and visibility required to provide the assurances that IT and web operations are running efficiently.

Systems Monitoring: The Nexus: A Single Console

Employing best business practices, monitoring takes place at three distinct levels:

Reactive monitoring, including server and storage issues. Reactive monitoring generally produces a trouble ticket for the IT and operations staff. Further, reactive monitoring provides diagnostic metrics but only occurs when and after there’s a problem.

Obviously, this means lowered productivity and even high-priced downtime, sure to lessen business margins across the board.  Tools that are used for reactive monitoring are typically red-green light displays (system on/system off).  No performance intelligence is provided for analysis and system refinement. Just a display of on-off settings. Frankly, not very useful in assessment and planning.

Proactive monitoring, is the process by which a systems management console routinely checks the health across the entire configuration of platforms and supported applications. This pro-active approach identifies problems and downstream consequences. However, this constant, automated oversight creates increased network traffic and stress on the various devices that comprise the system under pro-active scrutiny.

Predictive monitoring employs telemetrics to seek out failure points within the system and to identify these potential weaknesses before they become expensive fixes. Predictive monitoring has been employed by the military and nuclear energy industry for years, enabling operators to analyze real-time data prior to a negative impact on the project or operation.

Today’s business web infrastructures employ variations of predictive monitoring.  These “solutions” are heavily dependent on agents that “live” on host platforms and continuously measure deep interactions across the chimney stack of software and services.  This intense, on-going monitoring enables sophisticated systems administrators and operations teams to ID degradation at all service levels and, to eliminate response latency before real-time issues turn into real-world problems.

Predictive monitoring pinpoints a variety of potential system failures including:

• pending hardware failures
• malformed queries
• memory leaks
• broken or run-away threads
• software bloat (usually associated with long-running applications)

To maintain highest efficiencies, today’s businesses employ quality monitoring services solutions and avoid the low-end, unsupported OSS and low-cost “work-arounds” that don’t deliver metrics in a format useable by all stakeholders.

Simple.

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to our RSS feed. You can also subscribe by email and have new articles sent directly to your inbox.