The Problems:

The Solutions:

Too Much Data: There's just too much complex data with no clear path to resolution, or the collected metrics aren't deep enough to help with your root-cause analysis. Too much time is spent digging into system logs instead of solving the problems

Isolate the Problem: Ensure monitoring tools can quickly determine if it's an application, server, or network problem. When the IT Services and Applications aren't performing well, a solution should tell you why, allowing you to take proactive measures before things becomes critical

The Problems:

The Solutions:

Virtual and Physical Chaos: It can be tough to see what you have and what is going on in your virtual and physical environments from one place. How can you find virutalization opportunities in your IT infrastrucutre and then how do you monitor, analyze and report on them?

See Everything Clearly: Consider a solution that can monitor and report on all the physical and virtual machines, including VMware, AIX LPARs, and Solaris Containers. Look for a "Server Virtualization" report that can automatically discover which servers in your infrastructure might be ripe for a virtualization.

The Problems:

The Solutions:

Service Level Reporting Nightmares: It's hard to see if you are meeting or not meeting my Service level Agreements (SLA), and then why or why not. How do you generate Service Level reports to prove you and your teams are doing a good job? When things do go wrong, how can you prove that it wasn't your team's fault?

Dashboards and Professional Automated Reporting: Demand simple and clear automated IT reports that will show management that objectives and SLAs are being met. Ensure you have a IT Dashboard view of systems that's valuable for both for the end user and the IT executive.

The Problems:

The Solutions:

Tough to Trust: Too many false or non-existent IT monitoring alerts means it's tough to trust the alerting system anymore and users are finding out about outages before you do

Solution Intelligence: Look for intelligent alerting and auto-recovery that can save you before things get out of hand. A solution should automatically find what you have and start monitoring without any hassles. The more automation, the easier it will be.

The Problems:

The Solutions:

Too Much Work: You're sick of baby sitting your current server monitoring solution. There are too many manual tasks, and not enough server monitoring that is automated.

Everything Automated: Everything that can be automated is, to give you and your IT staff the time to focus on more important projects

The Problems:

The Solutions:

Framework Headaches: The big frameworks that management bought are draining your budget and your soul. It's painful to deploy, there's no practical and easy training that help you solve the real problems, and you don't want expensive consultants and vendors. The agents are too heavy, and complex, adding load to your servers.

Easy to Use: Find a server monitoring solution that's easy to learn, deploy, & manage for your team. Make sure it just works, no matter what. Find a solution with a GUI that is simple, easy to use and navigate, and a place you don't mind spending time in.

The Problems:

The Solutions:

Not Deep Enough: SNMP and agentless monitoring is not giving enough data to help solve problems, intermittent/short life problems are hard to find, and you don't have the time to re-invent the wheel with low end freeware custom scripting.

Use invisible agents (passive and lightweight): Agentless monitoring won't give you the detailed metrics you need for real root-cause analysis. Also beware of the framework 'heavy' agents, that put too much load on the servers. Look for 'invisible' agents that are lightweight and capture detailed metrics as part of your solution.