Monitoring systems allow your resources such as apps and automation software to ensure they run as per schedule and without jeopardizing your business. Ideally, your monitoring systems should be able to empower your systems such that there is no opportunity for downtime or outages. What can you expect from your monitoring tool or a system?
- Ensure that no system crashes occur
- Increase the surveillance such that potential problems or trouble areas are caught by the monitoring system itself before they snowball into an outage
- It should be easy to deploy and run
- It should work and do its job such that it increases the productivity and efficiency of your existing system
Further, in the age of networked systems, your monitoring tools should also help outline and measure consumption of the bandwidth you are using.
- Your profits and business growth are tied in with your system performance. A consistently monitored system has fewer chances of failure.
- Reduce your overall burden of investing and maintaining expensive IT infrastructure. A monitored system will give lesser trouble, in the first place.
- Complement your overall business development efforts through proactive monitoring which allows your system personnel to catch potential trouble before it disrupts the operations.
Resource consumption monitoring
Ideally, your monitoring tools will also check your system and all apps on it for resource or bandwidth consumption patterns. When your system is checked in entirety, your resource consumption will also be revealed in the form of details of consumption by each app. Some advanced monitoring tools can also outline problems in advance, thus effectively allowing adequate repair and maintenance time before disrupting end-user experience.
IT service management is an essential today when most enterprises and small businesses are looking at providing timely deliverables to clients in diverse areas and industries. For most businesses, IT services management is synonymous with customer service and hence, a trouble point. However, it need not be that way. IT services, when managed efficiently, allow for better service delivery as well as reliable processes and operations.
IT service management implementation also helps streamline your IT functions such that processes are better optimized and more value-for-money.
Benefits of IT service management: There are several measurable benefits to deploying IT services within your business, including adding to the profitability of your business.
- Measurably reduce costs involved in running and maintaining your IT services and optimize existing resources through systematic streamlining
- Align your IT services with business needs and expectations with the help of management best practices
- Improve and add to the overall value proposition of your business towards your customer
- Improve overall business productivity through aligned goals and better understanding, company-wide
The future
If you are an enterprise or a small business currently, understand that this will not remain the case forever. In fact, most small businesses grow at a fast pace and may outpace the forecasts made in the beginning. IT services management can help you provide better services through better understanding of infrastructural capabilities and customer expectation and needs. Your IT services management can create strong foundation on which your business growth needs can continue to be met, regardless of changes in size of the business. Better still, it will allow your platforms to be ready for surges in growth without slacking either in client deliverables or customer services.
You use a lot of different web apps, so your system would need different monitoring tool to do justice to each of the apps. Right? Wrong. A single tool can do a good job of monitoring your system just as well, if it is designed effectively.
How do you define a single and yet effective monitoring tool for all the apps within your system?
Monitoring tools should be able to provide you with information in a form that is easy to understand; they should provide information about the performance of your systems and raise flags, if needed.
Monitoring simplified: Your system monitoring tool should not be too complex to deploy. It should combine ease of use and simplicity along with the ability to monitor key areas within the system. Ease of use together with ease of visibility when reading reports can be a vital factor in the efficacy of your monitoring tool. Reports can be in the form of graphs denoting statistics; for elements like transactions within a given time frame, percentages and graphs can provide data quickly and in a form that is easy to read. Remember, system monitoring can include both, overall performance reports and deeper, detailed reports.
Ease of access: System monitoring tools that come with customized dashboards or access can help you set performance metrics and customize the tool to meet your needs. Ideally, you should also be able to see various components within your application and how they interact with each other.
This is better managed without the use of complicated codes or interfaces. Choose a monitoring tool that allows you a simple interface as well as set monitoring parameters for your system.
Follow key actions, business transactions, SLA compliance: Your monitoring tool must track and report on the key transactions and adherence to SLA, apart from monitoring the entire system. This can raise alerts at the right time, without allowing the user experience to be disrupted.
