Better Service Levels
Perhaps the largest benefit of unified monitoring to IT teams is the impact on service levels. Whenteams are able to meet aggressive SLA’s they worry less about network availability, end-user response times and application performance and increase their focus on overall service quality factors like faster, smoother deployment of improvements.
Lower Costs
Finally, unified monitoring goes a long way to decreasing the number of silo specific tools that are actually needed. Not only does this translate to more productive use of manpower, it also means reduced costs in licensing, maintenance, configuration, training, upgrading and the associated manpower.
IT Monitoring Selection Criteria
Selecting an asset as strategic as an IT monitoring system is made more difficult by confusing vendor emphasis on the features they consider most important. In reality, there’s only one set of features that matters: the ones you need to do your job. Every IT environment is different and every IT team has different needs.
DISCOVERY/VISIBILITY FEATURES
- Automated Layer 2/3 Network Discovery: Automatically discover networked assets
- Automated Network Mapping: Automatically map and document physical servers and virtual machines, clusters, vCenter server, and VMware ESXi hosts and guests.
- End-to-End Dashboard View: Show all network components and domains in one window/single pane of glass.
- Multiple/Customizable Dashboards: Support multiple out-of-the-box dashboard configurations and makes it easy to develop customer dashboards for individual users.
MONITORING FEATURES
- Monitor Network: Monitor anything with an IP address that is accessible by standard monitoring protocols like SNMP, WMI (Windows), and SSH (Unix/Linux).
- Monitor Applications: Monitor the performance and availability of business critical applications running on Microsoft, Linux, Java and virtual environments.
- Monitor Servers: Monitor the status and performance of both physical and virtual servers.
- Monitor Storage: Monitor storage devices and report on volume utilization, analyze storage traffic load via network interfaces and detect abnormalities in the system’s temperature, fan and CPU.
- Extensive/Custom Monitor Libraries: Support libraries of SNMP objects to monitor your network attached devices, a WMI library to monitor your Windows servers and applications. Supports easy custom monitor development.
- Monitor Wired & Wireless Networks: Discover and monitor the dependencies between wired and wireless networks. Supports fast response to performance problems using dynamic wireless maps displaying clients, access points and wireless LAN controllers. Proactively addresses trends with historical reports on access point subscription, signal strength, and hardware health.
- Trend Analysis: Retain historical data in order to prove SLAs are being met.
- Continual Monitoring with Minimal Setup: Start collecting data, receiving alerts and analyzing reports in under an hour.
- Role Based Monitoring: Allow for easy application of role based monitoring profiles.
AUDITING/REPORTING AUTOMATION
- Automated, Historical & Customizable Reports: Include multiple out-of-the-box reports that include historical data. Support simple customization to develop new reports. Track access and permissions changes and leverage out-of-the-box compliance reports for audits.
- Automated Inventory Reports:Quickly generate inventory reports on network assets, H/W modules, installed S/W data, warranty status and more.
- Automated Log & Event Management: Automatically collect store and archive logs. Generate out of the box compliance reports for PCI, HIPAA, SOX, Basel II, etc. Analyze logs to track access and permission changes typically required for compliance audits.
- Configuration Reports: Automatically inventory and store configuration files in a secure repository. Automate configuration changes and leverages configuration change audit trails for regulatory compliance and to restore device configuration.
AUTOMATION FEATURES
- Easy Automation of Manual Tasks: Discovery, mapping, inventory reporting, compliance reporting, etc.
- Configuration Management: Automates network device configuration including auto restoration.
TROUBLESHOOTING FEATURES
- Proactive Problem Resolution: Leverage custom dashboards, alerts and automated resolution to find and fix problems before users are impacted. Analyze network bandwidth utilization to assure critical applications and services are prioritized.
- Simple Interface: Accelerate the diagnostics process with a simple, single-pane-of-glass interface.
- Smart Alerting: Support flexible thresholding, alerting and alert suppression to eliminate alert storms for faster fault isolation.
- Diagnostic Reporting: Provide extensive reporting for diagnostics and SLAs.
EVALUATION/PURCHASING FEATURES
- Easy to Try, Buy and Use: Provide simple evaluation process making it easy to try before you buy.
- Simple, Flexible Licensing: Clear packaging and device-based licensing making it easy to scale without any surprises.
- Effective Scaling: Include support for future needs and doesn’t require additional plugins, licenses, etc. when your network doubles in size.
- Easy Set-up: Go from download to monitoring in less than an hour.
- Support: Support during evaluation, installation/setup and ongoing use.
By: Alessandro Porro, Senior Vice President, Ipswitch
