Can you afford not to monitor your IT environment?

Over the past decade, the business environment has changed dramatically, and IT no longer merely supports business operations, but underpins them and forms a backbone so vital that often business cannot function without it.

Businesses now rely so heavily on their IT infrastructure, from networks to databases to e-mail and every other system and platform in between, that downtime in a single area can cause operations to grind to a halt, affecting profit and causing losses to the bottom line that can run into the millions.

Implementing proactive monitoring solutions can go a long way towards ensuring that this type of damaging downtime does not occur, by identifying potential issues before they become crippling problems.

Monitoring solutions are a common investment in certain areas of the IT infrastructure, in particular databases, however, there are many areas of the infrastructure that are not covered and organisations would do well to look at extending monitoring solutions beyond the database, with an eventual view towards including the entire infrastructure.

One of the reasons for the piecemeal approach to monitoring systems is cost, as typically these systems are very expensive. Monitoring systems tend to be packaged with certain products such as databases, so systems are put into place for specific products only. The complexity of the IT environment also increases the complexity of holistic monitoring systems.

However, it is becoming increasingly important, if not essential, for organisations to extend monitoring beyond the database in certain circumstances. Because of the cost involved, implementing a blanket monitoring system right off the bat may not be financially viable; however, taking a step-by-step approach can provide huge long-term benefits further down the road.

Proactive monitoring, as previously mentioned, is vital for many organisations as downtime can cause huge revenue losses. And the fact is that in any enterprise there are multiple points of failure, from the network right through to the power supply, the hardware, the operating system, middleware, databases and applications. Many service level agreements will guarantee uptime, but without a monitoring solution it is impossible to ensure that this actually happens. If the services are not monitored, downtime will only be found out when users report it, which lengthens the process and can cost companies hundreds of thousands of rands.

Companies need to weigh up the cost of having these systems in place with the cost of downtime in specific areas, and identify areas that are critical to the business. These are the most important systems that need to be monitored with a proactive solution to ensure maximum uptime. From there a roadmap can be created for the future, to include other areas into the monitoring system.

What businesses need to bear in mind is that monitoring is not a 'once-off' - something that can be implemented and forgotten about. It should be a continuous process, beginning with critical layers and implementing high availability, failover and monitoring, and then moving from there according to the roadmap on to other important business areas.

Roadmaps form a very important part of the monitoring process. Because it is possible to monitor to an incredibly granular level, right down to who is sending what e-mails and SMSes when, knowing what it is that your organisation needs is very important. By knowing where the IT infrastructure stands with regard to monitoring, and where ideally the organisation would like to be, it is possible to move towards this ideal while ensuring that the solutions implemented are fit for the purpose of the enterprise.

When selecting monitoring solutions it is important to ensure that these are proactive, not reactive, in order to minimise downtime, because a proactive solution will let you know where issues are so that these can be fixed before things break. Other factors to be examined include whether or not the solution meets the needs of the organisation out of the box, and that the cost of the solution does not outweigh the benefits. Organisations should consider solutions built on open standards to help reduce the cost.

When it comes to implementing a monitoring solution it is important to have a skilled and knowledgeable partner with the skills to implement the various solutions. Partnering with a provider that knows the space and has the skills available ensures that the resources for the implementation are available, without the hassle and expense of having to hire these in-house.

A monitoring solution can deliver great return on investment by ensuring that lost revenue due to downtime does not occur. If IT is critical to a business, then proactively monitoring this environment can save thousands of rands by preventing systems from failing, and ensuring uptime as much as possible.