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Best Practices for Infrastructure Monitoring

Infrastructure monitoring covers everything from intrusion detection to network optimization. That can help you determine if a router is down or an intruder is taking your company’s data. Networks are growing more complicated, so network integrity is more important than ever. Even if you have a small business with a basic network, you should have infrastructure monitoring. But for larger companies, it is vital to keep your business running.

Understanding Performance Monitoring

Monitoring your infrastructure involves deploying software to automatically detect availability and performance issues in your whole technology stack. Catching problems before they become severe can help you avoid costly fixes later. This software looks at the virtualized environment, operating system, hardware, and any applications, which is vital for bigger businesses. Larger infrastructures encompass private and public clouds while spanning multiple locations. IT departments often struggle to work with all the moving parts, and that’s where automation comes in. There are several benefits of automating your approach, including:

  • Handling issues faster than a human can
  • Responding immediately
  • Running around the clock without needing human intervention
  • Reducing errors

A program like App Optics offers cost-effective, highly scalable infrastructure monitoring. As soon as there’s an issue, you’ll be notified. That lets you reduce the time until resolution.

Best Practices for Infrastructure Monitoring

Following some best practices can help you make the most out of your software. Before you start, remember it’s better to buy software instead of trying to create your own. IT systems are becoming ever more complicated, and by building your own, you risk missing something critical. When you’re getting the system set up, determine before you begin what the most important notifications are. If you’re bombarded with emails for minor problems, you might miss a message about a critical issue.

Now come up with a process for resolving alerts so you can get things running again quickly. For example, which issues do you need to let the manager know about? And which ones can be handled by the intern? Test the system before using it. The first time you see an alert shouldn’t be when there is an emergency. You’ll likely need to tune the system a bit. That way, you can see what type of alert to set up. Make sure that each message is comprehensive and actionable. If you have more than one data center, monitor them from each one. So, if you have three, monitor centers One and Two from Three and move on to the next one. Redundancy will help you check that everything’s working well.

Once It’s Set Up

Just because something is quiet doesn’t mean it’s working well. Even the best system can fail. The monitor might miss something. Just because you haven’t gotten an alert doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. Finally, review your performance metrics periodically. Your network bandwidth alert might be too stingy, or your CPU threshold may be too high. If you need help, don’t be afraid to ask your software vendor. They have consultants and staff to answer your questions.

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