Computer systems are useless if they are not available. The most amazing applications will languish unused if they cannot be accessed. Unscheduled downtime at an inopportune moment may result in major implications for a company or organization. Losing an eCommerce app on Black Friday or systems that tabulate votes on election day can cause catastrophic damage.
This post intends to offer some tips for reducing the chances that your environment will experience unscheduled outages. The recommendations all revolve around methods of monitoring your systems with the use of IDERA’s Uptime Infrastructure Monitor. Let’s take a look at some of the ways this valuable application can help keep your systems and your business running smoothly. These are areas that will benefit from the introduction of a monitoring tool.
CPU and Resource Overload
Overloaded system resources and CPU drain are issues that can result in downtime or the inability to meet service level agreements. In cases where no outage occurs, these problems may remain hidden for a long time under the guise of degraded performance. Users may put up with slower performance and the accompanying lost productivity. This comes at a cost to the business and will eventually reach the point where the issues need to be addressed.
Active monitoring of CPU processing combined with the ability to generate informative, real-time alerts is an antidote for this ailment. Uptime provides this capability along with the ability to study historical trends to determine if and where additional hardware resources are required. Having this information readily available makes it easier to get management approval for the necessary expenditures.
IT Services
The complexity and interconnectedness of IT environments can make it extremely difficult to quickly identify the cause of an outage. One source that is frequently the culprit in unexpected downtime is the failure or stalling of a critical system service. Windows systems that are powering your environment usually share the characteristics of being critically important and hidden.
In many cases, the failure of a service can only be discovered by monitoring specific performance metrics regarding your applications and servers. Uptime enables the monitoring of performance and availability metrics for the total environment from a single dashboard, making it easy to identify potential problems before they materialize. This capability is essential to preventing unscheduled downtime and its impact on the business.
Disk Space
Lack of disk space is the most common cause of unexpected downtime. Monitoring for space issues can be challenging, as you do not want to wait until the situation has reached a critical level before being alerted to problem conditions. You also need to avoid a flood of alerts that cause operator overload and wind up being ignored.
Uptime has the functionality to create the correct level of alerting that informs the appropriate personnel when disk issues need to be addressed. It can send alerts via phone, SMS, and email so proactive measures can be taken to prevent an outage. Hierarchical alert scheduling ensures that if a recipient is unavailable, the message is sent to the next person on the list.
Keeping an Eye on it All
IDERA’s Uptime Infrastructure Monitor offers a comprehensive platform that enables you to gain visibility into your entire infrastructure from a unified dashboard. It allows you to monitor all of your physical and virtual servers, applications, and network whether housed on-premises or with a cloud provider. The tool also offers capacity planning features to ensure that you always have the necessary resources on hand to do the job. Additionally, Uptime can be used as an SLA manager to help you avoid penalties for failure to meet customer expectations.
An informative IDERA whitepaper is available that includes links to download a checklist with which to compare Uptime’s features with other monitoring applications under consideration. There is also an ROI calculator that can be used to demonstrate the financial benefits of a monitoring solution. The paper helps solidify the points outlined above and is well worth the read. The availability of your systems may depend on it.