Does your company have a monitoring system?

Monitoring systems are essential to control and optimize the performance of ICT infrastructures in companies. Learn about their benefits, models and how to implement an effective system.

Nowadays, companies belonging to all kinds of business, increasingly rely on applications and have IT infrastructures seeking to optimize their businesses and draw clients.

Usually organizations have problems regarding IT; system failures, critic situations, etc. It is right then that a tool that makes the whole process easier comes into play. This concept may ring a bell, but even if it doesn't, we're going to analyze it in detail anyway; here we're talking about monitoring systems.

When a company needs to exhaustively control their systems, there's a function called "monitoring" which consists on following the status of the systems, the infrastructure and the present sub-systems, thus improving the company's productivity. With the appropriate monitoring system, you may monitor systems, applications or network devices and find out the status of each system element throughout time since you have the data and event history.

Whether you have a single platform or several, company performance improves when they have an intuitive interface and well though out features

It is worth highlighting that, within the monitoring sector, we face a wide fragmentation, since most of the companies have from two to three tools to monitor and control system performance.

Here you see a clasification of three distribution models such as Software as a Service, the open source software and proprierty solutions.

Regarding the SaaS model, the client accesses the monitoring software through the Internet, which is hosted in specialized servers such as those offered by Uniway, which has a data center of more than 1500 square meters in the heart of Madrid. Among the benefits of this model you may find cost savings, accessibility, scalability and resillience, reasons why it is one of the most client-seeked models.

Why should a company get monitored?

If you're not familiar with it, it may seem like a complex concept, but it's not like that and in addtion, it provides a series of benefits that make it highly recommendable.

A good monitoring system allows to increase efficiency and save costs.
- By having 24/7 control, detecting incidences and their source is much more simple, as well as keeping track of everything.

It allows to control service performance, as well as measure the traffic, rendering resource management easier.

Log centralization.

In addition, it will improve customer service satisfaction.

Alert reception, whether by SMS or email, right away.

It allows remote access from anywhere, with no service near-failure risks.

Among the main advantages, it is worth pointing out the proactive capacity of this tool, which thanks to the wide data collecting it carries out, anticipates and warns in advance when an issue is going to take place, allowing to have enough time to work on it.

Steps for good monitoring

Execute an exhaustive system analysis. It is possibly the most complex stage of the whole process and one of the most important ones that requires a monitoring tool. This analysis can be classified according to the type of component, the element inside the component ,the machine's IP or the brand of the component.

Next you must select those responsible for the different installation fields such as the system administrator, those responsible for networks and servers, security experts and application experts.

Thirdly, it would be quite convenient to define the alarms for each element.

It is also necessary to define the communication channels, as well as those through which the alarm notice process is sent and received, whether through SMS, push codes, etc.
- Before finishing, you should write a monitoring system installation outline, keeping the security measures and minimizing the number of intermediary systems between the monitoring system and the critical systems, reducing the impact on the system to be evaluated.