Friday, April 23, 2010

Does your monitoring tool have these 4 features?

A good monitoring tool is very useful for businesses which conduct their business-critical activities with the help of various applications. It helps in knowing whether their application’s performance is up to the mark or not. However, many business owners and IT heads struggle to find a monitoring system which is suitable to their business and meets all their requirements. Ideally, any monitoring tool which helps in preventing bottlenecks in the applications and prevents losses should be enough for monitoring applications within the organization. However, there are some features which your monitoring tool should have, which will make it a strong one. The following are some of them:

  1. It should support all applications within the business
  2. Until some time ago, application monitoring tools were created specifically for only a few popular applications. This required businesses to deploy multiple monitoring systems for them to be able to monitor all applications that were in use. This was an expensive and tedious task. There was a demand for a single monitoring tool, which would cover all applications across the organization. As a result, APM vendors have now come up with a single tool, which would reduce costs as well as efforts. Such a monitoring tool will help in ensuring that service level agreements are met and the business is managed efficiently.

  3. The monitoring tool should be able to give real time alerts
  4. Does the monitoring system you are considering provide real time alerts related to the availability and performance of your applications? If the answer to that question is no, then you should consider some other monitoring tool. In case of business-critical applications, you require real-time alerts if the application has a problem or if the response time is high. A good monitoring system will not only help IT managers in establishing a threshold, it will also provide real-time alerts in case those thresholds are crossed. This will also help in IT service management of your business.

  5. It should provide proactive and consistent application monitoring
  6. Monitoring of business-critical applications should be a proactive and consistent activity. A monitoring tool which helps in proactively monitoring applications can help in spotting as well as overcoming bottlenecks before they start affecting end users. Such a monitoring system will help in ensuring that all applications are available 24/7, so that the bottom line is not affected by application downtimes. Businesses can also avoid breaches in service level agreement conditions with such a monitoring tool.

  7. The monitoring tool should not intrude on the business environment
  8. The best monitoring system for an organization is one which is non-intrusive to the production environment. When you are looking for a good tool, inquire about one which excludes installation of any element on the database servers. Not only will such an independent monitoring tool help in reducing down time and improving application performance, it will also make IT service management easier for the system managers.

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