Has your company not yet found efficient ways to perform IT monitoring? Be aware that there are many others — even large corporations — that are also in the same boat. Among the biggest challenges to achieving excellence in processes involving IT, the complexity of environments, as well as applications and infrastructure, are recurring obstacles.
According to a study by Ipswitch, 66% of IT professionals point out that the growing complexity of IT environments has made it difficult to perform their tasks, generating excessive time spent and even more pressure to be managed by technical teams.
In recent years, the volume of devices and applications consuming IT infrastructure resources has grown exponentially and, in most cases, disproportionately to available network resources. This scenario change has caused environments, previously of ample capacity, to quickly become limited and obsolete.
This resulted in the appearance of bottlenecks that were previously nonexistent and even unthinkable. Because of this, teams have increasingly strived to find more flexible, user-friendly, and cost-effective monitoring and management solutions.
Facing all these challenges, how can your company begin adopting IT monitoring as a strategy to achieve excellence? To answer this question, we will present some monitoring measures that your company can start implementing, thereby ensuring greater service stability.
Establish and classify metrics
Metrics should be the first step when planning IT monitoring in your company. However, since processes are complex and go far beyond infrastructure, metrics should not be limited to the technical part, but rather cover all different types of crucial points.
In other words, try to classify metrics to obtain more accurate analyses. Below we will see two examples of metrics that can be adopted: work metrics and resource metrics.
By establishing metrics focused on system productivity (work metrics), system "health" is brought into focus. This means directing attention to its performance, analyzing, for example, the workload imposed on the system every second, how many tasks were successfully executed, the number of errors, and finally, the system’s performance level when performing each task.
On the other hand, resource metrics (resource metrics) are useful for diagnosing and investigating problems. A potential system failure can be explained by a monitoring report, which in turn consists of information such as the percentage of time the infrastructure is in use, average capacity utilized, and a log of obscure errors — which often go unnoticed.
Create configuration management
Configuration errors can lead to work delays and exposure of confidential data, causing the company to lose a lot of money and the IT department to take the blame — generating stress among employees.
To give you an idea of the importance of managing configurations, when a new process involves changes to firewall rules, for example, a simple error in these modifications can block a critical application.
With configuration management implemented, the chances of success with each change or installation on devices that influence system operation are much higher, as the administrator will be able to verify whether the changes made may or may not result in conflicts.
In addition, the administrator will be able to monitor what type of modification is being executed — and whether the execution will generate any conflict —, also preventing unauthorized users from making installations or changes to the infrastructure, ensuring greater protection for the company’s confidential data.
Use documentation to create a standard for how to do IT monitoring
Documenting everything that happens within the IT department is very important — even though it is a relatively laborious method of performing IT monitoring. In the documentation process, a survey of hardware and software configurations (and their quantities), processes, network configuration information, and everything else related to the company’s business that passes through IT is conducted.
Another factor of documentation to be considered is: not everything that happens is relevant at all times, but rather on certain occasions — usually when a specific problem occurs. Therefore, when all information is recorded in documents, it can be ensured that nothing falls into oblivion and all necessary information can be accessed at any time.
Bonus: Complete guide to implementing a Service Desk in your company
Use good monitoring tools
There are several tools available on the market that help with IT monitoring. However, a good portion of these solutions are considered inflexible and somewhat restricted in terms of their functionalities.
Thus, opting for Open Source software becomes more viable, given the possibility of available customizations.
Obviously, the implementation of these solutions requires deeper knowledge of these platforms, as well as monitoring routines. In this case, it is interesting to have a partner that assists in the implementation and management of monitoring services, making the internal team’s role more strategic than operational.
In this scenario, the internal team can dedicate more time to availability tests, expansion strategies, and analysis of data originating from the monitoring system, identifying bottlenecks and optimizing internal processes.
Use collected data to drive improvements
Finally, another major purpose of implementing the various "best practices" for IT monitoring is improvement management. By relying on a properly qualified team with highly relevant information at their disposal, the refinement of IT services as a whole will be natural, as improvements can be made continuously.
We hope our article was useful for your learning! If you have any questions or want to enrich our content with more tips, be sure to leave your comment!
