Data, data, and more data. As we digitize the amount of information handled by a company increases exponentially and as these increase, so do the difficulties in terms of handling and management.
Today, companies of all types of business rely more and more on applications and have ICT infrastructures to optimize their businesses and attract customers.
It is common for organizations to run into problems in the technological aspect; system failures, critical situations, etc. It is at this moment that a tool comes into the picture that facilitates the entire process. This concept probably sounds familiar to you, whether or not it is so, we are going to analyze it in detail; we talk about monitoring systems.
When a company needs to keep an exhaustive control of its systems, there is a function called ‘monitoring’ which consists of monitoring the status of the systems, infrastructure, and subsystems present, thus improving the productivity of the company. Whether you have one platform or several, the performance of companies improves when they have an intuitive interface and well-planned functions. With the appropriate monitoring system, you can monitor systems, applications, or network devices and know the status of each element of a system over time since it has historical data and events.
Whether you have one platform or several, the performance of companies improves when they have an intuitive interface and well-planned functions
It should be noted that within the monitoring sector we encounter a wide fragmentation since most companies use between two and three tools to monitor and control the operation of their systems.
Thus, we observe a classification of three distribution models such as software as a service, open-source software, and proprietary solutions.
Concerning the SaaS model, the client accesses the monitoring software via the internet, which is hosted on specialized servers such as those offered, which has a 1,500-square-meter data center in the center of Madrid. Among the benefits of this model are savings, accessibility, scalability, and resilience, reasons why it is one of the models most demanded by customers.
What reasons does a company have to monitor itself?
It may seem like a complex concept if it is unknown, but it is not and it also provides a series of benefits that make it highly recommended.
- A good monitoring system increases efficiency and saves costs
- By having 24×7 control, it is much easier to detect incidents and their origin, as well as to have control of everything.
- It allows monitoring the performance of services, as well as measuring the traffic, thus facilitating resource management.
- Log centralization
- In addition, it will improve customer service satisfaction
- Receive alerts, either by SMS or email, instantly.
- It allows remote access to the systems from anywhere, without the risk of a drop-in service.
The main advantages include the proactive capacity of this tool, which thanks to the extensive data collection it performs, anticipates and warns of when a problem is going to occur, thus allowing it to act in time.
Steps for good monitoring
- Run a thorough system scan. It is probably the most complex part of the process and one of the most important parts that a monitoring tool requires. This analysis can be classified according to the type of component, element inside the component, IP of the machine, or brand of the component.
- Then, you have to select those responsible for the different areas of the installation, such as the system administrator, network managers, server managers, security experts, and application experts.
- Third, it is convenient to define the alarms for each element.
- It is also necessary to define the communication, emission, and reception channels of the alarm information process, either through SMS, email, push codes, etc.
- Before finishing, a monitoring system installation plan must be drawn up, maintaining security measures, minimizing the number of intermediate systems between the monitoring system and critical systems, and minimizing the impact on the system to be studied.
- Finally, we proceed to the installation and configuration of the selected software package.