As enterprises continue to expand their datacenters and computing networks, IT departments are faced with the task of managing these systems and their capacity demands. Unified server monitoring has become necessary for monitoring these ever-growing servers and datacenters and achieving greater transparency in the monitoring and reporting of system events.
However, a goldilocks-like dilemma evolves when the solution is either too big (ITSM) or too small (point tool solutions) to appropriately meet the IT department’s server monitoring and capacity management needs. In this blog, we will identify the most common pitfalls of IT systems management solutions and show you how you can find a server monitoring solution that’s just right.
- Monitoring the Wrong Data Do you use “agentless” or SNMP server monitoring? If so, you may be monitoring the wrong data. On the other hand, ITSM suites sometimes generate so much data that it is difficult to sort through and pinpoint important data points.
- No Clear View of the Data Do you find that, more often than not, you’re alerted of problems by end users before they’re identified by your server monitoring software? Does your root-cause analysis often fail to turn up the underlying causes of problems? If your answer to either of these questions is “yes,” you need a server monitoring solution that provides a transparent and high level view of all of your systems, making it easier for you to pinpoint underperformance for more proactive troubleshooting.
- Manual Server Monitoring Do you spend a significant amount of time each workweek engaging in manual scripting and server monitoring tasks? Do you manually monitor server backup systems or does your server monitoring program notify you when they are in use? If you are engaging in manual server monitoring, it’s time to enter the age of integrated server monitoring.
- Complexity and Hidden Costs Is the “shelf ware” piling up at your IT department? Was your ITSM framework difficult to deploy? Have you spent more money on consulting for your ITSM than the original cost of the framework itself? If your ITSM framework is large, clunky and complicated, you may not be getting your money’s worth.
- Frankenstein Tools On the other side of the spectrum, IT departments that don’t want to invest in expensive ITSM frameworks may attempt to meet their server monitoring needs by cobbling together a collection of freeware and point end tools. These lower end tools often require labor intensive custom scripting and rebuilding. It is also difficult if not impossible to integrate these tools into high level dashboards, making server monitoring a manual and time consuming task.
If the problems that we’ve outlined in this blog post are problems that your IT department regularly encounters, it may be time to invest in new server monitoring software. In the age of mushrooming servers and cloud computing, it is imperative that you look for a fully unified server monitoring solution with a single dashboard view that unifies IT monitoring and capacity management into a single, unified package. To learn more about what you can do to streamline your server monitoring efforts, download white paper The 12 Pitfalls of IT Systems Management.
But why is SNMP a must if you want to get a handle on your datacenter? There are two main reasons:
