In a time when IT monitoring is more important than ever, it’s crucial that IT teams have the best solutions available to ensure businesses continue to run smoothly. For those organisations taking a cloud-first approach, there’s even more to consider when searching for the best solution including cloud service costs and operating at a global scale.
Recent research from Paessler found that one of the biggest frustrations for IT teams at work is when systems are flagged as having problems when none exist. A third (34%) say false positives are their main issue. Frustrations like these can lead to a drop in productivity and can be a huge distraction for teams, wasting their time on problems that don’t actually exist, and preventing them from addressing actual business critical issues.
With this in mind, it’s crucial to get the right monitoring tool in place to avoid frustrations like these. So, what are the monitoring tool ‘must haves’?
#1 Keep an eye on cloud service costs
If you follow the cloud-first approach, you will inevitably have virtual devices in use that reside on the Internet. Most likely, your provider is either Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Microsoft Azure.
All these services are charged for, and you are usually billed according to actual usage. The more computing resources and storage space you need, the higher the costs.
So, the first important point is to keep track of these costs in as much detail as possible – and to be automatically notified as soon as costs threaten to get out of hand.
#2 Think global
If you’re the IT administrator at a global company, for example a company with pure online sales for the distribution of its products with customers and partners located all over the world, thinking on a global scale, and having an accessible online store is essential.
The same applies to employees, who need fast access to the necessary cloud resources at all times, whether from Europe or from Asia. The future monitoring solution must be able to regularly check and permanently monitor worldwide accessibility.
#3 Combine IT and OT
One of the best ways to minimise blind spots in your infrastructure is to consolidate all your monitoring data in one tool. For monitoring the industrial Ethernet, you can use the same principles as traditional IT, for example: SNMP, bandwidth monitoring with flow protocols, and so on.
Industrial gateways can be monitored using OPC UA and other protocols. If your devices support Modbus, a common OT protocol, you can also hand it over to the care of tools such as PRTG.
#4 Don’t forget your local resources
In addition to all the cloud services and the production floor, many companies also still have local components that they also want to monitor.
This is where monitoring tools can make full use of a unified monitoring approach – even if the actual monitoring solution resides completely in the cloud.
#5 Discover peace of mind
An all-in-one monitoring solution that keeps an eye on your entire business infrastructure and alerts you before problems occur nothing less should be the goal of every admin.
You should also make sure that you have individually configurable dashboard functions available. This way you can create overviews and always have an insight into your critical infrastructure components.
If a component in your network is faulty, a properly configured notification management system helps you to ensure that the responsible colleagues are informed immediately.
All of this lets you sleep tight at night; your monitoring solution is your 24×7 IT/OT infrastructure guardian!
Martin Hodgson, Regional Sales Manager Northern Europe at Paessler
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