IT monitoring comprises a broad class of products designed to let analysts determine whether IT equipment is online and performing to expected service levels, while resolving any detected problems. IT monitoring tools range from basic checks to more advanced tools that can granularly examine a product’s performance, or even automate repairs when problems are suspected.
When used with a web server, an IT monitoring tool might analyze trends in CPU and RAM utilization, or determine whether hard drive space is running out and how often the system has crashed over the last year.
IT monitoring, which includes network monitoring and application monitoring, has evolved dramatically since 2010 to keep up with the complexities of IT environments. Notably, IT monitoring tools can now monitor both on-premises and cloud-based systems. And with hundreds of available monitoring products and tools on the market, monitoring systems vary greatly, each differing in complexity and approach. Thus, the perfect IT monitoring tool or monitoring software for one company may be a bad fit for another.
The concepts inherent to IT monitoring have wide crossover with other disciplines, including IT Operations Management (ITOM), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), Operational Intelligence (OI) and many others.
This article explores the basic types of IT monitoring, the types of tools and how IT monitoring works in conjunction with management and network performance, DevOps and automation, and how to choose an effective IT monitoring strategy.
What is IT Monitoring: Contents
The basic types of IT monitoring include availability monitoring, web performance monitoring, web application management and application performance management, API management, real user monitoring, security monitoring and business activity monitoring.
While there’s no completely canonical list of the various types of IT monitoring tools, many terms include multiple types of monitoring, blurring the lines that define this market. Here’s a look at the general types of tools that comprise IT monitoring:
Note that all of these tools may be tasked with monitoring on-premise equipment or applications and may be used in conjunction with cloud-based systems, or both.
Security IT monitoring is used to observe threats and suspicious activity in the network.
IT infrastructure monitoring tools can be broken down into three general categories or types of network devices — observational, analysis and engagement — based on how they’re used:
IT monitoring tools provide the information upon which management can act. IT monitoring is a part of management, collecting and delivering performance information so it can be leveraged for tactical and business decision making.
Information delivered by IT monitoring tools let business managers delve more deeply into the impact of IT infrastructure on the top and bottom line. That 0.11% downtime translates to 11 minutes of unavailability per week. During prime business hours, 11 minutes in which the system is unable to process payments may have significant cost. How does this compare to the cost of replacing a memory card in the server or upgrading the network to avert that downtime? Or is there a process issue that should be addressed to resolve the problem? If downtime is increasing, a savvy manager may deduce that even greater trouble is on the horizon, and may use the IT monitoring data to make the case for replacing or upgrading existing hardware.
IT monitoring has an increasingly important role in the realm of DevOps, mainly because DevOps revolves around the concept of multiple-team collaboration, particularly development and operations. But more and more, enterprises have found even greater benefits when other departments are drawn into this mix, including security and QA/testing teams. Only when all of these groups work together as a cohesive team can a software or service product launch be successful.
IT monitoring is a natural complement to this concept, particularly relevant for products that rely on high availability, such as a cloud-based service or an app that relies on your company’s API. When these services slow down or crash altogether, customer satisfaction, and possibly revenue, can drop to zero. As such, it’s critical for DevOps teams to work to ensure that critical systems remain operational and responsive, and to build these measurements of performance directly into the development process from the start.
Another place DevOps and IT monitoring overlap is with regard to the increasing pace of product updates, as applications sometimes are updated several times a day. Monitoring is essential in these types of environments, as the breakneck pace of development often provides minimal time for quality assurance before a new update goes live. In some cases, an undiscovered bug makes it into production, causing a key system to experience an unacceptable slow down or crash. With a solid, real-time IT monitoring solution in place, these errors can be detected quickly, often within seconds, allowing the DevOps team to remedy the problem immediately, or roll back the code to a known working state, minimizing downtime.
That said, in the world of DevOps, IT monitoring is also forward-looking. DevOps monitoring systems can be tasked to monitor the very tools that developers use in their own work, helping managers spot areas that are inefficient or that could benefit from automation.
IT monitoring is an increasingly important component of DevOps because it requires multiple-team collaboration.
IT monitoring comes to bear on automation primarily with engagement tools. As noted, automation can take the form of automated service tickets or alerts, or they can perform a complex series of actions that remedy a problem that’s been detected by the monitoring tool without human intervention.
The more complex the infrastructure, the more necessary automation becomes. In enterprises of even modest size, there are simply too many moving parts for humans to manage, which becomes even more complicated with hybrid systems that combine both cloud and on-premises networks.
IT monitoring tools that incorporate automation are designed to simplify all of this. If a server is slowing down in response to a sudden burst of customer activity, the tool may diagnose the problem as an overloaded CPU, and could automatically instruct another server (real or virtual) to take over. When network traffic decreases, it may then decide to spin down that second server. The tool also has the ability to issue a root cause report about the incident so that management can decide whether an upgrade is in order.
IT monitoring tools are used in a wide variety of ways by analysts, and there’s no canonical guidance for exactly how they should be utilized. That said, in broad terms, analysts use IT monitoring tools to execute a plethora of critical functions, such as:
IT monitoring tools are used in a variety of ways by analysts.
If you’re ready to launch your own IT monitoring strategy, here’s a step-by-step guide to getting started.
How you use the tool is just as important as which tool you choose, and some solid best practices to consider include being savvy with alerts, considering alert level and medium, refining dashboards, creating an escalation plan, embracing redundancy and watching for outliers.
IT monitoring is not just about telling a technician when a server crashes, it’s also about intelligently predicting these problems in advance and, increasingly, automating a response to remedy these problems before users are actually impacted.
As IT infrastructures have become increasingly complex, it has become essential for IT managers to implement systems that allow them to keep pace. By formally integrating IT monitoring into your entire ecosystem, you can dramatically improve operations along a wide variety of metrics ranging from simple service availability to ensuring high performance and overall profitability of the business.