Top Tips for IT Infrastructure Monitoring
IT infrastructure monitoring is essential for maintaining your IT resources in good working condition. IT infrastructure includes all business assets that are necessary for the running and support of an organization’s IT Services. They include both physical and virtual assets.
What is IT Infrastructure Monitoring
IT Infrastructure Monitoring involves inspecting business systems to aid diagnosing the performance and availability issues of computer systems and networks.. Issues could be discovered quickly and action taken before problems can escalate.
Infrastructure to be monitored should cover everything that is part of IT resources for your business including the hardware, network, storage devices, and applications.
Monitoring should also take into consideration the complex interactions among IT components and how they affect one another.
Importance of IT Infrastructure Monitoring
Infrastructure monitoring allows businesses to have a real-time view of IT infrastructure in order to support the overall objective of your business.
Infrastructure monitoring lets you track the health and performance of your devices so that you can better identify and fix serious imminent failures before they can shut down your IT operations. By collecting data about infrastructure, you can measure the current status and performance of IT systems. This will make it easier to compare current and past performances to gain unique insights. System activity data can be analyzed to draw recommendations and correct potential future anomalies.
If you don’t have infrastructure monitoring in place, you run the risk of having forgotten zombie servers on your network. These are servers that do nothing but consume power and add to your cost of doing business. The lack of an IT infrastructure monitoring can also lead to malware infestation of your system. Without a mechanism for monitoring and flagging suspicious applications or network access, your organization’s system could be completely hijacked without you knowing.
BEST PRACTICES FOR INFRASTRUCTURE MONITORING
It is not enough to have an infrastructure monitoring system but you must do it the right way. Here are some best practices to follow:
1. Prioritize Reports
IT infrastructure generates a large amount of data, hence the need to prioritize notifications in order to isolate important alerts such as server outages.
You should determine the kind of notifications that are most important for your business. You can list them in a descending order starting with the most critical to business function.
Your monitoring software should then be configured to deliver notifications about specific systems to your team.
2. Plan for Redundancy
Your IT infrastructure should be optimally monitored from more than one location especially if you have many data centers.
3. Test and Inspect your Monitoring Process
Don’t just set up alert processes and forget about them. If you’re not receiving alerts it doesn’t necessarily mean that nothing is wrong with your system.
To ensure a properly functioning IT monitoring system, your installed monitoring systems should be inspected for the correct settings and configurations.
The monitoring system should also be tested with anticipated alerts to see how it will perform when it goes live.
4. Choose a Reliable Vendor
As a small business owner, you will often rely on external tools for your IT needs. Since there are many product offerings out there, only select products from reliable vendors that offer support and consultation to get the most value from your purchase.
5. Review Your Monitoring Metrics Regularly
Due to changes in your business priority and goals the metrics and KPIs you use in configuring your alert system may need to be modified.
This is because the initial threshold you said might be too high or too low to handle your current business goals.
INFRASTRUCTURE TO MONITOR
Items to monitor as part of the infrastructure monitoring process should include the following:
1. Hardware
Hardware needs to be regularly monitored for performance and errors. Items to be monitored can include power and battery life, load sensors, fan speed, drive health and other important systems. This will help you identify malfunctioning or failed devices.
2. Network
You can monitor the network of your system by tracking the transfer rates and connectivity status. With this setup, you can detect an unauthorised user on your network or troubleshoot connectivity issues quickly.
3. Applications
Software is an important part of running a business IT infrastructure.
Through application monitoring, businesses can also learn about users’ behaviour on a particular application to draw insights and identify new business opportunities.
4. Virtual Systems
A large part of modern business IT includes resources on the cloud or virtual machines. In order to keep these resources in optimal state, virtual systems must be monitored as well.
5. Operating System (OS)
The operational capacity of an OS can determine the speed and efficiency of running specific applications on it or its response to client requests. Metrics such as CPU speed, memory and error logs are useful for detecting problems earlier in business systems. They can also tell whether your current system has the optimal capacity to support your business needs.
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As IT resources become more complex, more data is generated, hence the need for efficient monitoring to separate important system messages from the noise.
The right IT infrastructure monitoring tools allows IT experts to efficiently spend their time on high-value issues rather than battling to save a business from avoidable problems.
Effective monitoring requires deep knowledge of an organization’s IT infrastructure. As a small business owner with limited resources, securing the services of an MSP such as SDTEK will ensure that you cover all the bases of IT infrastructure monitoring.
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