The importance of proper system monitoring

Monitoring is the basic pillar of IT departments. Knowledge is power, and power is the capability of deciding what, how, when and how much. For this, it’s necessary to keep your computer systems monitored, since these degrade over time and need maintenance. If we properly know our IT platform, we know where we can go and make the necessary investments (or disinvestments) . It’s always better to plan ahead.

IMPLEMENTING AN IT MONITORING SYSTEM

Thanks to the monitoring of servers and services we can detect weaknesses and bottlenecks, enhance processes, and prevent and solve issues. Implementing a monitoring protocol in our systems and services is highly important because:

You can set up alerts that notify you when something isn’t working properly
You can see in detail the performance of your services, both for the internal network and for your clients
You will have logs of all your systems in real time, and you can improve the system’s maintenance
You will detect the origin of incidents

WHY MONITOR COMPUTER SYSTEMS?

This can be scalable: thanks to the monitoring of your platform you can detect where you need to grow, according to the system’s actual usage. With this data we can plan ahead and predict when we’ll need more disk space (and how much), increase our memory, or use additional servers. Or, on the contrary, we will realize that we have overdimensioned platforms that are becoming a waste of resources.

By monitoring, we cut costs. Knowing our actual needs will give us power when it comes to making decisions about investing more (or less) in infrastructure. Computer monitoring has become a key part of the process when it comes to establishing an IT department, because we need to prevent and detect incidents to solve them before it’s too late.

Thanks to this we will be able to take full advantage of all our resources and infrastructure, reducing costs as we were saying, both regarding our platform and human resources. Ultimately, an enhanced system will result in better client satisfaction.

WORKFLOW FOR EFFECTIVE SYSTEM MONITORING

It’s vital to have the ideal tools to monitor our systems, but also to design a proper workflow that helps us to solve problems and to improve the daily operations that take place in our platform.

At Transparent Edge we have a work methodology that adapts to each platform. Our approach is proactive and constant.

System monitoring = detection + analysis + solution + iteration

1.DETECTION

First we have to ensure that everything is working properly. For that, we perform system and security audits.

2. ANALYSIS

Once we have our platform optimized, we set up monitoring alerts. It’s crucial to categorize them to know where they impact, and how critical they are. These alerts are received as incidents. We consider an incident everything that generates an interruption or degradation of the service. This way, when one occurs, our technicians can analyze it to know the scope, the cause, and solve what is happening as soon as possible.

3. SOLUTION

Monitoring helps us know what causes the service interruptions, and to keep the platform available, safe and fully functional. Additionally, thanks to log and event analysis, we can propose and implement configuration changes so that the performance of these systems improves, while also making them more stable.

4. ITERATION

The goal behind monitoring is to continue detecting problems so that we can ensure the good performance of the system, and detect redundant resources for critical services. Thanks to server monitoring, we can reach high availability levels.

At Transparent Edge, we perform two kinds of monitoring: predictive monitoring, which allows us to make decisions, and proactive monitoring, which detects and solves problems.