Monitoring at Cloud Expo

The IT professional’s basic mission is to use IT to increase the efficiency of the business (at Cloud Computing age).

To attain operational efficiency, this means using the same amount of resources but improving service delivery and lowering costs.

The menu of expectations for IT system management reads like this:

1) Simplify and streamline system management through automation;

2) Enable IT to perform proactive system management, heading off potential problems before they result in service degradation;

3) Prioritize system management activities based on business impact;

4) Permit integration of IT processes across IT service management disciplines.

But one very important factor for IT meeting agreed-upon service levels is that strong server and network monitoring is required.

In order to be effective and efficient, however, monitoring must be comprehensive and from a centralized perspective. This set-up also allows IT to minimize initial and resolution response times for any and all business critical services.

In the past, companies had to choose between agent or agent-less systems to do really good monitoring. But you have choices now. You can adopt technology that merges the two into a single, hybrid system. Organizations can choose the monitoring system that best fits their needs and budgets.

This latest hybrid monitoring approach provides the vastly granular monitoring presented by agent-based technology where required, combined with the cheaper cost of agent-less technology, where in-depth monitoring is not needed.

Here’s an example: IT can apply agent-based monitoring on crucial ERP and Web servers, and apply lightweight agent-less monitoring for less significant servers and department printers. This provides IT a complete and affordable view of the whole IT environment. The outcome: your IT staff gets operational visibility into all components of the IT landscape – including components not previously monitored.

And to name just one advantage of monitoring from the cloud, this can all be done centrally and comprehensively.