Monitoring your IT operations enterprise is a critical function to any company’s both short and long-term success. In today’s business landscape, the IT operations of a company themselves often make the difference in year over year growth and a company that stalls every quarter. Distributed monitoring is an asset that while extremely valuable, not many companies fully understand what the term actually means. In distributed monitoring, you split the monitoring over various instances for a variety of reasons. Among those reasons is security of data, network location, availability of independent locations, organization of various different departments and groups, and most of all performance of your many machines. Today we take a look at those, among other features, to consider in your search for a distributed monitoring platform to put your trust in.
Each and every software you use has a look and feel to it that you notice as soon as you start it up for use. The software you ultimately decide to go with for your distributed monitoring should be no different. In a field such as IT operations with near constant turnover, the easier your software is to pick up and use right away, the less time (and thus money) it will take keep the software you pay for up and running as it should. A learning curve and long training times will also put your efficiency and safety in jeopardy, with the lag times from training sessions.
Another feature of distributed monitoring you will want to consider is integration of Nagios environment, which will allow you to scale to any large infrastructure you are migrating to. Many times you will want to ensure that you are building your distributed monitoring solution with Nagios for the right reasons. You’ll want to use a distributed monitoring scheme to take advantage of Nagios, monitoring local tasks and reporting back the results in a timely and clean matter. You’re configuration doing so will make all the difference in the world, so you’ll want to make sure it is done in a clean and efficient way to ensure no lapses in monitoring.
Alerts are another big feature that you may find it hard to do without in your distributed monitoring solution. Everything from bandwidth levels to network connectivity are functions of your IT infrastructure that you will want to make sure, as an IT manager and leader, are running at optimal levels around the clock. Often times, an alert feature can assist in notifying you in essentially real time of any issues as they become problems, so you can “stop the bleeding” so to say. Alerts come in many forms this day and age. From alerts stemming out of the software itself, to SMS text massages to emails, you can always be sure that you are kept in the loop of any issues as they occur. Not to be overlooked, security intrusions over your network are another instance where alerts can be absolutely critical as part of your defense.
Free demo versions of the software you are considering are a good idea to try out before ultimately making your purchase. By acquiring your distributed monitoring software before buying it, you can make sure that it is compatible with the host of other software you are currently running on your platform. You can also make sure that your team is on board with its functionality and its something they can use “right out of the wrapper.” In general, its just good business practice to do your due diligence and trying out a free demo of any software you are even considering investing in.