IT infrastructure monitoring as a whole picture is about keeping track of the health and performance of all the IT assets in a network environment. The network management system gathers data on various metrics, like availability, health, performance, and utilization. Then IT infrastructure monitoring transforms this data into useful statistics that help enterprises scale their businesses.
However, monitoring the whole IT infrastructure is a tedious process. It does not just involve monitoring the existing and newly added devices. It involves monitoring all the devices, both physical and virtual, along with the operations and services running on them, the bandwidth these devices use, any configuration changes made to them, various logs, and IP addresses.
Thus, a highly integrated, feature-rich tool is necessary to make monitoring your entire IT infrastructure a cakewalk.
Vital elements to monitor in an IT setup
IT infrastructure monitoring involves monitoring all five spheres of the network. Keep reading to learn about them.
1. Device infrastructure monitoring
One of the basic elements to monitor in an IT infrastructure is the devices—not just the ones you see but also the virtual ones. Monitoring all the devices along with the software, interfaces, applications, and services running on them is crucial. You have to evaluate various aspects of the devices, like availability, performance, health, memory, and the CPU level.
It is important to monitor the device environment as a whole. This helps the network admin establish a roadmap for optimizing network performance and keeping it up and always running. This ensures the network stays ahead of outages.
2. Bandwidth monitoring
Bandwidth monitoring is another important factor to consider while monitoring your network infrastructure. Monitoring the bandwidth helps you understand the bandwidth usage, traffic, and hogs that choke network performance. A sudden spike or dip in the bandwidth usage or traffic is often due to a malicious attack. Thus, it is important to track the bandwidth of the devices and the network.
3. Configuration change monitoring
As you might know, making configuration changes is essential to protecting the network from breaches. Monitoring changes is as important as making the changes in the first place. This ensures your network and services do not suffer outages due to misconfigurations. It is also crucial to have proper backups of the original information before the changes are made.
4. Firewall and log monitoring
Achieve deeper insights into traffic congestion and security threats by monitoring firewalls closely. It is crucial to monitor the logs, such as event logs, syslog, and firewall logs, to prevent network errors from occurring. This helps the network administrator detect security threats before they affect the end users.
5. IP address monitoring
It is important to monitor the IP addresses of the IT infrastructure to prevent the intrusion of any unknown devices into the network. With websites becoming the face of a company, website downtime might lead to a drop in potential leads. Monitoring the websites along with the devices helps you prevent website downtime.
Advantages of IT infrastructure monitoring
Here are a few advantages of monitoring your IT infrastructure.
Decreased downtime
Though proactive network monitoring is crucial, it is also important to monitor a few metrics at well-defined intervals. This allows you to evaluate the performance of the network, keep the entire IT infrastructure healthy, and keep downtime at bay. Extended downtime can lead to unreliability and a loss of revenue. With the right network monitoring tool, high network availability is ensured.
Improved planning
Effective planning is the key to solving capacity-related problems. Proper network planning helps businesses meet present and future requirements. It also helps them reduce costs on impromptu purchases. A network monitoring tool with capacity forecasting can guide a network admin to create a practical network roadmap, preventing capacity overflows and network outages.
Enhanced monitoring
Monitoring the whole IT infrastructure helps network admins understand what is a priority for their network and what is not. Thus, you should monitor critical metrics regularly and non-critical metrics on a lower priority basis, depending on your network’s requirements.
Fortified security
IT infrastructure monitoring helps admins understand the layout of the network by exposing the vulnerable points on which the admins need to keep a close eye. Also, it sheds light on suspicious activities within the network, enabling the admins to take a proactive approach in resolving security threats as soon as they occur.
An increased ROI
A good network monitoring tool should be a one-time investment. It should be able to quickly meet all your network’s technical requirements. It automates manual tasks and reduces human effort over minor tasks. Proper IT infrastructure monitoring has a crucial positive influence on your enterprise’s ROI.
Managed resources
It is impossible to monitor your whole IT infrastructure without a proper infrastructure monitoring tool. Having multiple vendor-based network monitoring tools makes the task messy. Thus, you should look for an efficient, feature-rich, affordable network monitoring tool that makes monitoring easy.
Challenges of IT infrastructure monitoring
Read through some of the challenges of IT infrastructure monitoring.
Distributed networks
With positive trends in business growth, the desire to expand globally and become an established brand is pushing many businesses to become better. However, it should be noted that the network infrastructure gets split with expansion. In other words, the devices become clustered in different geographic locations and have to be monitored individually. Distributed networks are independent network infrastructures in a connected environment. Monitoring the network as a whole is difficult without a centralized probe. Choosing the right tool that can monitor the entire IT infrastructure and run efficiently is crucial.
Inefficient monitoring practices
Since an IT infrastructure is huge, it is tempting to use different monitoring tools for different purposes. Most vendors offer network monitoring tools, and it might feel methodical to have a separate tool for each purpose. But the data generated becomes too much and is uncorrelated. Using various tools isn’t good practice for a network. Using a single, all-in-one network monitoring tool makes network troubleshooting easy.
Domain-specific monitoring
One of the major challenges of network monitoring is domain-specific monitoring. Monitoring devices such as servers, routers, switches, and firewalls is the norm in an e-commerce organization filled with computers. However, this isn’t necessarily the case in every domain. Each domain has its own unique devices that need to be monitored. For example, a healthcare network might have a medical device that cannot be monitored in the same way as the other network devices. Thus, it is necessary for your network monitoring solution to have some customization options.
A lack of proper integrations
Centralized network monitoring is essential, but it is equally important to monitor the other components of the network, such as the firewalls, IPs, and bandwidth. Even if you have a proper network monitoring tool that takes care of availability, performance, and health, a co-worker might make a simple configuration change that causes the network to crash. It is crucial to use compatible integrations that up your network monitoring game.
How OpManager Plus approaches IT infrastructure monitoring
OpManager Plus is a highly integrated network monitoring solution that helps you achieve all your IT infrastructure monitoring goals. With a single tool, get your hands on four compatible integrations. Bring about harmonious monitoring of your bandwidth with NetFlow Analyzer, configuration changes with Network Configuration Manager, firewalls and logs with Firewall Analyzer, and IP addresses with OpUtils.
- This unified monitoring approach is available in our one-stop solution to help you proactively discover and monitor your physical and virtual network infrastructure, bandwidth, logs, changes, and IP addresses.
- The multi-platform OpManager Plus quickly identifies performance bottlenecks and raises color-coded alerts to help network administrators resolve issues before they affect end users.
Workflows automate repetitive troubleshooting activities and eliminate manual intervention in the process. - The powerful dashboard helps you prioritize what is essential for your network by letting you customize its widgets.
- Scale your entire IT infrastructure by integrating with external tools, like ServiceDesk Plus, ServiceNow, and Slack, in the click of a button.
Learn the out-of-the-box capabilities of OpManager Plus by scheduling a live demo or by downloading a free, 30-day trial right away!
