IT services management can help your business in many ways, including in helping you improve the performance of applications and ensure they are utilized optimally.Even then, management of IT services may not be sought after actively by businesses. The reality though, is that when managed effectively, IT services management can contribute towards making your business more profitable. Here are a few of the ways in which the management of IT services can help a business:
- Elements critical to the business must be made part of communication to both, IT and business components. If it is the marketing resource you’re talking to, communicate the value of IT to them, highlighting the areas where it is indispensable to business operations. This can help you implement IT services, thus promoting effective management.
- When your IT services management is on track, most issues will undergo troubleshooting more smoothly. Proactive management can take care of most IT problems before they hinder business operations.
- IT services management can help you interpret various applications better; and also understand the effect of application performance on the end user and different business processes.
- If you have a Service Level Agreement in place, IT service management can help with reporting compliance.
When implemented successfully, IT services management can also help you determine elements necessary or components you need to watch out for when deploying a new application. Effective IT service management can help ensure your new application is meeting expectations related to its performance and helping the business in the manner intended.
Monitoring response time and availability of systems come into focus wherever applications are used; for automation purposes, as user interfaces, etc. Monitoring systems can be intimidating for a company, especially in case of multiple applications. Thorough and comprehensive monitoring can prove to be highly effort-intensive. This rings especially true for small and mid-sized businesses, where resources are scarce and the budget, restricted.
Further, even if the small business has IT resources, they are probably managing the network, ensuring uptime and performance; undertaking comprehensive monitoring for the system can further take up precious time and effort.
Comprehensive monitoring of applications is also influenced by the performance of the network. As a result, the scope of comprehensive system monitoring is pretty large. This can be compounded by the system complexity. Further, most complex systems can be spread over diverse applications, thus increasing the efforts for the monitoring tools. It must be remembered that regular monitoring increases efficiency of the system, in turn allowing for optimized performance.
How to define a healthy system when monitoring it?
A quick response time and increased availability are the hallmarks of a well-performing system. These are also the areas that should be monitored regularly to ensure a healthy system. These parameters can provide a fair idea whether the application is meeting requirements or not. But, in consumer interfaces, monitoring systems for these parameters can prove to be difficult. Real time monitoring of applications can prove to be immensely challenging.
Single solution for all
Ideally, a single comprehensive monitoring system can work wonders for busy organizations where diverse applications are used, such as web applications, legacy and client server applications. Further, single systems, if chosen wisely, are better at monitoring than several different ones which may gloss over several applications, inadvertently.
Choose a monitoring tool that supports not only diverse applications, but also different protocols and environments. For businesses that may have budget restrictions, a single tool can help by not just carrying out a comprehensive review, but also by bringing down costs. More importantly, an efficient monitoring system will ensure that the application is running as expected and is also helping in cutting down costs. Savings in terms of money are also determined by the manpower that is exempted from running manual checks on the system.
Comprehensive tests: An efficient monitoring system will run a large number of checks across the period of a day or 24 hours. This means a test taking place every minute.
Thorough detection: The monitoring system should be testing your applications in a thorough manner, including diverse protocols and services such as POP3, https, etc.
Reporting: After detection comes reporting. Unless problems are reported, action cannot be taken. Comprehensive monitoring systems will have a sound reporting system that highlights issues and problems so they can be repaired.
About the Author:
Tevron develops and delivers Application Monitoring Solutions, Service Level Agreement, IT Service Management, and end to end performance monitoring system available globally. Tevron has also successfully delivered enterprise Application Monitoring Solutions and Testing solutions to support every IT enterprise application to hundreds of customers across the globe. Tevron's solutions designed to support diverse environments, business processes and applications with a service oriented management.
