Are you Implementing Smart IT Monitoring?
Yesterday afternoon I sat down to start working on this blog, a very similar topic to a webinar that I presented (view the recording here “Smart vs. Dumb IT Monitoring – Get Smart in 5 Easy Steps.”) In order to engage my thoughts with this topic, I first needed to ask myself the question; “What is smart monitoring?” This question helped me better understand how difficult it is for an IT Manager to improve their IT monitoring operations, regardless of infrastructure and IT process maturity.
I began to think about the customers and prospects that I have spoken with over the past decade. More specifically, about how they monitor their infrastructure, applications/services and what specific challenges they face in doing so.
Through these conversations, I built the following list of 7 key questions that I ask anyone who is considering improving their IT monitoring process:
- Are you monitoring your entire IT infrastructure?
- Do your systems and services recover automatically after an outage?
- Can your infrastructure self-heal during periods of performance degradation? Can it auto-provision additional capacity for itself, if necessary?
- Is your monitoring “topology-aware” and does it auto-escalate alerts to the right people at the right time?
- Do you measure the availability of key business services and report them to your customers?
- Do you have a monitoring “tool soup” or a unified monitoring system with a centralized IT dashboard?
- Do you know your TCM (Total Cost of Monitoring), and which way it is trending and why?
I hope you give these questions some thought. If you can answer “Yes” to all of them, I would say you are doing things very well. If not (like many of the IT operations I have come across), then there may be some definite improvements you can make. I won’t get into the details on “smart monitoring” in this post, but here is the link to the recorded webinar - “Smart vs. Dumb” IT Monitoring Webinar , where I provide a clear path on how to regain control of your IT monitoring operations, and drive higher IT performance at a lower cost.
Tags: infrastucture, IT, IT monitoring, IT Systems Management, monitoring, Smart vs dumb IT monitoring, unified monitoring system
Subscribe to this post's comments
