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In the IT world, performance and uptime monitoring are like bridge tenders. That is to say, no one pays much attention to them until something goes wrong. It’s an approach that more businesses should rethink. Having a solid monitoring procedure in place can yield significant benefits to intelligence gathering and decision making, as well as optimizing daily operations.
One of the first places to focus on when developing a monitoring system is for server and process uptime. As most of us have experienced firsthand with home computers, the fact that the computer is up and operational is no guarantee that your desired program is running. Identify all the critical applications it takes to deliver your web site and other services. This would include your HTTP server software, DNS, inbound and outbound mail server applications, authentication servers, and anything else particular to your environment. Your process and uptime monitoring scheme should also include IPs for internal and external server interfaces, routers and switches, network attached storage devices, and any other important hardware with an interface reachable with PING or other network monitoring protocols.
It is helpful for administrators to have visibility into the other systems that deliver your web site and network applications, for example, temperature, humidity, and power in the operating environment where your infrastructure is deployed. If you have peering with multiple backbone providers, you’d want to know the health of those network connections. You’ll also want to monitor resources like processor overhead, memory usage, and available storage space. When it comes to monitoring, more is almost always better, and the information you gain from monitoring processes has a hidden value.
Typically, monitoring is used as an alarm system, reactive in nature. A server crashes, the monitor detects that it’s offline, and a series of notification events is subsequently triggered. That system is tried and true, but it misses a larger point- when used effectively, monitoring systems don’t alert in the event of downtime, they prevent the downtime from occurring in the first place. This is where the secret weapon comes in.
A good monitoring system generates a tremendous amount of valuable information that can be used for a variety of business planning purposes. Utilization numbers can be graphed to plan for infrastructure upgrades. Traffic numbers can be analyzed to help gauge the effectiveness of sales and marketing initiatives. These statistics can also come in handy when it’s time to negotiate service contracts, by understanding which providers carry the bulk of your customer traffic. The sum total of all this is a tremendous advantage when coordinating activities across different teams in your organization.
Here’s a real world example- your marketing group lands a featured role in a high profile event that will showcase your company to a new customer base. They confer with the IT group, who uses the information gleaned from monitoring processes to discover that projected upgrades will need to happen right around the same time as the scheduled event. The necessary upgrades are accelerated by several weeks, putting the company in an optimal position to make a strong impression. Without the advantage of a strong monitoring procedure, this was a potential disaster.
That’s the kind of monitoring edge you get included with all of NaviSite’s managed and dedicated hosting services. Our team of 24/7/365 Always There ™ engineers isn’t just watching for systems to fail, they are proactively monitoring to head off potential failures, ensuring your performance and availability. It’s just one more way that NaviSite is totally committed to your success.
Tags: Always There, Enhanced services, free server monitoring, managed services
