(“In Case You Missed It Monday” is my chance to showcase something that I wrote and published in another venue, but is still relevant. This week’s post originally appeared on Frontier Enterprise )
Like every great relationship, communication and transparency are essential, and IT systems are no exception.
IT ecosystems are diverse, comprised of different solutions and servers. Monitoring allows companies to gain a deeper and more detailed understanding of the interdependencies across their IT assets like applications and servers. Having an overview of application performance can also help address network optimization concerns, and the lesser the downtime, the better user experience and ultimately fewer calls into IT—a win-win for everyone.
Whether you’re looking to take the next step by scaling your infrastructure or content to keep things steady, infrastructure monitoring is still the answer. By having a 360-degree view of your network, you know everything is performing inside your operational parameters, and tracking persistent issues, receiving notifications, and crafting automated responses becomes much easier to manage.
Identify and Resolve Problems at the Roots
Affairs of the heart may be hard to navigate, but it doesn’t have to be this way when it comes to your IT environment. Weeding out the source of issues is easier than it seems—all we need to do is pause for a little introspection.
Maintaining a stable relationship requires constant communication to avoid misunderstandings, and it requires you to identify and address problems in the relationship before they spiral out of control. Your IT environment is no different. Networking problems can come from almost any fault within the infrastructure, whether it’s a bandwidth bottleneck, configuration issues, or a faulty networking component. Having the ability to quickly identify and resolve system issues goes a long way toward ensuring optimized performance and making sure issues don’t escalate further.
The ability to streamline monitoring and management across these infrastructures grants businesses the visibility and agility they need to pinpoint the source of problems and respond faster. By freeing up valuable time to work on more mission-critical tasks and move your agencies forward, you can save your organization a lot of headache and grief.
A Healthy Relationship Is One Where You Grow Together
As your enterprise grows, so will the scale and complexity of your IT environment. Like every relationship (romantic or not), it’s often said a good relationship is a safe haven for both parties to grow, personally and together. Outgrowing a relationship or partner usually means it’s time to move on.
A larger network of systems, databases, and servers means more channels to coordinate, optimize, and synergize, which effectively means network monitoring practices must be robust and agile to keep up with the growing complexity. With this comes a host of challenges: a more complex network requires a deeper and more detailed network monitoring approach and requires administrators to look closely into the status of their applications and servers. Consider mapping tools or solutions like intelligent, auto-generating, and contextually aware maps to quickly isolate network issues.
Happy System, Happy Life
No different from the formula of cultivating sustainable long-term relationships, you can easily manage your IT ecosystem with streamlined communication and centralized visibility. A proactive analysis of your infrastructure allows you to predict or identify performance problems and nip them in the bud before they snowball out of control while ensuring every cog in the machine is operating as intended.
Remember, your IT system is your partner, and you and your team would do well to treat it as such.