Hybrid working is now a standard part of many organizations’ operations making their IT estate more complex than perhaps ever before. But while all these new technologies are driving efficiency & improving collaboration, they must be functioning optimally at all times to do so. Any degradation in service levels and your organization’s users stand to lose more than their productive edge; they will also lose faith in your IT systems.
That’s why an enterprise monitoring strategy is a must have for organizations that rely on technology to enable their business users to do their best work.
What Is An Enterprise Monitoring Strategy?
An enterprise monitoring strategy, also sometimes known as a systems monitoring strategy, is a comprehensive plan for observing and measuring the performance of enterprise IT architecture. It involves setting up monitors at set points throughout the system to track key performance indicators (KPIs) and identify issues as they arise.
There are many different types of monitors that can be used in a monitoring strategy, but some common ones include network traffic monitors, application performance monitors, database activity monitors, and server resource monitors. Each type of monitor serves a unique purpose and provides different information that can be used to troubleshoot problems before they impact service, and/or optimize system performance.
What Should An Enterprise Monitoring Strategy Do For Your Organization?
A strategy like this should help your organization in a number of ways. First, it can give you visibility into the end-to-end performance of your applications and infrastructure. This allows for any potential bottlenecks to be identified proactively and the root cause behind them addressed. As a result, your business systems will be optimized and performing at their best, consistently.
Second, an enterprise monitoring strategy can help you to reduce costs by identifying and addressing issues early or before they happen. This allows your business users to stay connected and continue to be productive, instead of waiting for a solution, unable to work until it’s resolved.
Finally, an enterprise system monitoring strategy can help you to identify any areas that may require upgrading in the future. With insightful information being relayed from your monitoring solution, your IT teams can see how certain aspects of your architecture perform under load. If any resources come close to being depleted, your IT admins can earmark the infrastructure for upgrade as part of your scaling plans.
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What An Enterprise System Monitoring Strategy Should Look Like
All too often, enterprises focus on individual components of their enterprise IT monitoring tools instead of looking at the big picture. This can not only lead to finger-pointing among teams, but also delays in incident resolution.
An enterprise monitoring strategy should encompass all aspects of your business, from the data center to the cloud and everything in between. End-to-end monitoring is critical for identifying problems and ensuring that they are resolved quickly before they cause major disruptions.
To be effective, a monitoring strategy must also be tailored to the specific needs of the organization. There is no one-size-fits-all solution; each business has its own unique requirements. The most important thing is to have a clear understanding of what needs to be monitored and why. This is where partnering with a managed services provider can be extremely valuable.
Another pertinent point to remember is that this type of strategy must be an organic thing; it should be reviewed and updated on a regular basis in line with your business needs. As your organization evolves, so too must your monitoring strategy.
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How To Craft An Enterprise Monitoring Strategy Specific To Your Organization
The first step is to understand the goals and objectives of your organization. What are you trying to achieve? What are the pain points that you’re trying to address? Which of your systems are business critical? Once you have a clear understanding of these things, you can start to put together a plan.
The next step is to assess the different monitoring solutions that are available on the market. There are a lot of great options out there, so take some time to research and find the ones that are best suited for your needs. Any decent monitoring provider should be willing to work closely with your organization to find out all its idiosyncrasies before they even begin to suggest a solution.
With the right enterprise IT monitoring tools in place, it’s time to start implementing your strategy. A good place to start is by focusing on your most critical infrastructure components. This will help ensure your priority services and applications are being proactively monitored, keeping your business operations from experiencing any service interruptions. From there, you can expand your end-to-end monitoring to cover other aspects of your organization’s IT estate.
How To Measure An Enterprise Monitoring Strategy?
There are several ways in which your organization can measure the effectiveness of its monitoring strategy. Perhaps the most obvious is by how many service disrupting incidents your IT support teams report in a given period. In theory, if your enterprise monitoring solution is working correctly, you should start to realize a decrease in service interruptions. This will also reflect in terms of you meeting your service level agreements (SLAs) with your business users.
Another way to measure your enterprise system monitoring strategy’s success is by reaching out to your business users. At the end of the day, these are the people who use your systems in anger every day. Their insights into which applications and solutions consistently perform well, as well as the ones that come up below par, can be enormously valuable as you hone your enterprise monitoring.
However, service interruptions can actually be valuable when it comes to enterprise IT monitoring, as long as you use them as a learning experience. That’s because they can help your IT teams and external partners review your monitoring solution and tweak it to be more effective in the future. It is testimony to how your enterprise monitoring strategy should be a constantly evolving part of your overall IT strategy.
Take The First Step On Your Enterprise Monitoring Journey
Interested in learning more about managed IT monitoring, enterprise monitoring software, and creating a strategy that is tailored to your organization and its needs? Contact Us and talk to one of our managed continuity monitoring service professionals to find out more.