What is IT Monitoring

As technology has evolved to meet increasingly complex operational demands, IT infrastructure has become more intricate. For most businesses, gone are the days of purely on-premises infrastructure. Most of today’s enterprises are powered by a wide range of hybrid models incorporating some form of off-site, cloud-based, and local systems. Downtime or performance issues arising from various components of these complex systems can result in significant financial costs to a business, and regularly collecting and analyzing performance metrics of all the links in the chain is key to minimizing issues. 

In order to ensure all systems are running smoothly, an IT monitoring strategy and tools are needed. IT monitoring helps analysts measure the performance of their IT equipment to identify and respond to any problems. Covering a wide range of products, IT monitoring tools have a number of different applications, including measuring web-based service performance, security issues, and CPU utilization. The practice of IT monitoring is not one-size-fits-all--different enterprises will have different needs, and there are numerous IT monitoring tools on the market of varying power and complexity depending on what an organization’s infrastructure requires.

Different kinds of IT monitoring

IT monitoring can serve numerous diverse components of IT architecture and usually fall into two categories: proactive and reactive. Some basic types of IT monitoring include:

• System monitoring: Also known as availability monitoring, system monitoring measures the performance and uptime of infrastructures like servers and CPUs, alerting analysts to potential problems before they cause a major impact. 
• API monitoring: This form of IT monitoring tracks the performance of third-party integrations to ensure they are available and working reliably. 
• Web performance monitoring: This keeps track of web-based services, including measuring speed issues like how long it takes to fully load a web page or how quickly individual page elements are being delivered, as well as identifying performance issues, such as where errors are popping up.  
• Real user monitoring: Real user monitoring results in reactive action, tracking how actual end users are interacting with your services and where problems are happening. 
• Security monitoring: Monitoring systems for red flags before an attack can occur saves an enterprise from potentially devastating losses. Breaches or unusual activity are identified through security monitoring. 

IT monitoring tools

Functionally, these tools range from providing basic reporting to more complex solutions that can automatically fix issues that occur. The three basic types of tools are:

• Observation: These IT monitoring tools provide basic reporting of the operational performance of software, hardware, and services. 
• Analysis: These tools take observation a step further by analyzing and providing insights into the data they’re collecting to pinpoint where problems are occurring and why they’re occurring, or to predict where issues may occur in the future. 
• Engagement: The most advanced IT monitoring tools are capable of taking action based on their observation and analysis, such as rebooting systems, utilizing backups, or submitting tickets to those responsible for resolving the issue. 

IT monitoring keeps systems running smoothly 

Using tools to collect performance metrics about your IT infrastructure is essential to keeping your systems running optimally and minimizing downtime, saving your organization money and time in the process. With a wide variety of IT monitoring solutions on the market, it’s important to evaluate your organization’s specific needs and come up with a strategy for proactive and reactive monitoring. 

A continuous intelligence solution like Scuba Analytics can be used for IT monitoring because it combines multiple disparate data sources in one place and provides complete data--without a lengthy ETL process, speeding up the time it takes for critical insights.

Interested in Scuba? Try a free demo today or speak with an expert.