Thursday, February 18, 2010

4 Features of a Good Application Monitoring Tool

Businesses which rely in their IT infrastructure for business-critical activities need a strong monitoring system or monitoring tool for determining whether their applications are functioning properly or not. However, business owners and IT managers usually struggle to find an ideal monitoring tool for its IT infrastructure, which suits all its business requirements and helps prevent bottlenecks which affect the bottom line. In this post, we discuss some critical features your application monitoring tool should have, in order to become a strong tool for system monitoring.

A strong application monitoring tool should have the following four features:

  1. Support For All Applications
  2. Until a few years ago, monitoring tools offered support for specific popular applications only. This meant that businesses needed to deploy different monitoring tools to monitor various applications used by them. However, with the increasing requirement of a single monitoring system which can monitor all applications throughout the organization, new vendors have now come up with a single monitoring tool. Such an all-encompassing monitoring system eliminates the requirements of different tools as well as reduces costs.

  3. Real Time Alerts
  4. A strong monitoring tool is one which can provide real time alerts on application availability and their response times, which helps IT managers in knowing the performance of all applications. Such a monitoring system helps IT managers establish a threshold, and generate real time alerts in case those established thresholds are crossed. IT managers can then take the appropriate steps to overcome those bottlenecks before they start affecting end users.

  5. Proactive And Consistent Monitoring
  6. Application monitoring needs to be undertaken proactively and consistently by the monitoring system so that application health issues can be addressed as soon as possible. With such proactive application monitoring, bottlenecks can be prevented before they become bigger problems. Such a monitoring tool can help IT teams ensure application availability, so that all the business-critical applications function 24/7 without a hitch.

  7. Non-intrusive
  8. An ideal monitoring system should also be non-intrusive to the production environment. Find a monitoring tool which does not install any element on the database servers. Such a non-intrusive and independent monitoring tool will ensure that, all applications across an organization are monitored constantly and any bottlenecks can be avoided before they start affecting end users.

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