Managing Enterprise IT environments can be an overwhelming undertaking. The complexity that has been introduced by virtualization and the cloud make this initiative even harder to negotiate successfully. But the increased reliance by businesses on their computing resources makes it more important than ever before. Failure to effectively manage the hardware and software that runs a company can result in detrimental financial and operational impacts.
There are two main components to viable IT management. Essentially, an organization needs to monitor their current systems to ensure they are performing up to expectations. They also need to be aware of capacity concerns so that future needs can be proactively addressed before they negatively affect the ability to meet customer requirements. It demands a two-pronged approach to acquire the information to make intelligent decisions regarding your IT environment.
There are many tools on the market that are designed to address the issue of IT management. Some concentrate on providing deep insight into a limited subset of the environment. Large information technology service management (ITSM) packages attempt to furnish an all-encompassing solution. Both types of tools can be expensive and may not provide the information that you need.
When your company is searching for a way to successfully manage their IT resources, some factors need to be considered. Here are some potential problems to avoid when monitoring your servers or engaging in capacity planning.
Server Monitoring
Monitoring IT environments has been standard practice since computers were first introduced. It makes sense that an organization investing in computing resources should want to know what’s going on with their systems. Going about it in an unstructured or haphazard manner will not provide the insight needed to optimize your systems and address performance roadblocks.
These are some of the most important points to consider when evaluating a server monitoring solution.
- Identifying the scope of monitoring can be difficult. You need to decide what exactly needs to be monitored for you to achieve your goals. The idea is to obtain enough data to make informed decisions and to be alerted to problems in your infrastructure. At the same time, you do not want to be buried under piles of data that are irrelevant to your concerns. Coming up with the right balance will result in more efficient and valuable server monitoring.
- The right balance of monitoring agents is key to efficient and informative monitoring. In some cases, agentless monitoring solutions do not provide enough detail on the monitored entity. Conversely, large ITSM systems employing agents may impact performance by adding additional load and overhead to the IT components they are monitoring.
- A confusing mixture of tools may have been introduced to your environment to address specific systems. These tools are hard to integrate into higher-level dashboards and add unnecessary complexity to an already complex process. They may also require extensive training to use, making them less valuable to the IT department on the whole.
Capacity Planning
Capacity planning is the second component of an IT management strategy. It’s not enough to ensure that your current environment is meeting expectations. In order to grow your business and remain competitive, you need to know when your resources are reaching the limits of their capacity. This allows you to address the needs before they become apparent in degraded system performance.
As with a monitoring solution, there are factors that make a capacity planning solution more beneficial to your company’s needs. Here are some things to consider.
- Capturing the right data from which to make your planning decisions is critically important. You need a tool that collects enough data to create a baseline to use for trend analysis. It also must be able to gather and store data to enable long and short-term trends to be spotted.
- The ability to convert data into actionable results is another important feature of a capacity planning tool. Pointing to potential solutions or processes that address capacity issues makes the tool much more valuable to the IT team.
- Using multiple tools will make it harder to correlate the accumulated data to make enterprise-wide decisions. Running different tools on your various computing platforms will hinder your planning efforts.
Selecting the Correct IT Management Tool
Choosing the right tool with which to manage your IT environment is key to implementing an effective strategy. You need the flexibility to address the diverse platforms that encompass your computing environment. There may be instances where you want to use agents to monitor your systems while others benefit from an agentless solution. Then there is the issue of putting the data into a usable form.
IDERA’s Uptime Infrastructure Monitor offers a comprehensive solution for managing your IT environment. It can be deployed in an agent or agentless manner to address specific areas of your resources. The application performs monitoring of physical and virtual servers as well as your network devices. It can be used on the Windows and Linux platforms and includes capacity planning and management tools. All this from a unified dashboard that enables you to monitor your environment from a single pane of glass. It’s a complete solution that enables efficient enterprise IT management to help keep your business systems optimized and your users satisfied.