Contact us anytime to know more — Kuldeep K., Founder & CEO CISIN
How and why is infrastructure monitoring essential to cloud-native architectures today? This article introduces infrastructure monitoring, business value, and implementation techniques in your organization.
Infrastructure Monitoring
Infrastructure monitoring is a process that collects and analyzes IT systems and infrastructure data to enhance business operations and increase value within an organization.
Infrastructure monitoring is vital to your infrastructure's survival, gathering all necessary data on its availability, performance and resource efficiency to provide an overall picture.
System performance has become ever more essential to businesses as applications and service revenue streams rely on them for revenue streams.
Millions of individuals rely on them for unemployment benefits, small business loans, grocery shopping and telehealth - these services have become mission-critical to individuals and organizations alike.
Infrastructure monitoring allows organizations to address problems proactively before they arise and avoid losing money and time; therefore, it serves a crucial role.
It delivers these key capabilities. Ability to optimize the user experience and business requirements:
- Flexible and scalable enough to accept data from different sources and manage expected and unexpected traffic spikes, the software provides for a seamless transition of planned and unplanned traffic spikes.
- Ability to identify outages and send alerts regarding resource usage, performance degradation, and outages to reduce downtime and improve operational efficiency.
- To locate a problem in an infrastructure or application system, identify its cause.
- Determine the source of an issue to find its location within an application or infrastructure system.
- Ability to target specific infrastructure components that have become dysfunctional and initiate remediation strategies for them.
Infrastructure Monitoring In Cloud Environments
Modern infrastructure demands modern monitoring solutions.
This is particularly relevant when working in multi cloud environments that don't always provide visibility of cloud infrastructure. Monitoring such environments is difficult because each cloud vendor offers its own monitoring tools - this prevents organizations from having a comprehensive overview of their cloud architecture when dealing with multiple monitoring tools simultaneously.
DevOps teams may find themselves experiencing a similar transition from an "animal or pet" model to one in which computing assets are interchangeable resources rather than something exclusive and irreplaceable.
Organizations embracing microservice architecture and cloud native technologies also implement best practices to manage them effectively to provide better services with reduced unscheduled downtimes. Infrastructure monitoring is integral in maintaining healthy cloud-native environments and creating an enhanced user experience.
It also include some important point:
- Synthetic monitoring
- Intelligent observability
- Log monitoring
- Network devices
- Business outcomes
What Are The Advantages Of Monitoring Infrastructure?
Organizations cannot wait until alerts arrive when system components, applications, or services fail, especially if they wish to comply with end-user Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Thus, it is vitally important for organizations to take a proactive approach to infrastructure problems; monitoring their environment enables this goal by speeding root cause analysis while encouraging cross-functional team members to collaborate more efficiently on solving any potential problems that might occur in real-time.
Infrastructure monitoring enables organizations to analyze performance trends in real-time, helping them better comprehend peak performance levels, optimize when necessary, and identify potential issues early.
DevOps teams can use infrastructure monitoring for A/B tests. In doing so, teams can quickly see how new features or enhancements might influence application performance in the future.
DevOps also uses infrastructure monitoring as a verification process before deployments take place.
Modern monitoring tools offer teams comprehensive visibility of their infrastructure for consistent customer satisfaction while meeting organizational goals and scaling for growth.
Take the upcoming performance clinic Network and Infrastructure Performance Monitoring of your Hybrid Multi Cloud to gain more knowledge on monitoring network and infrastructure performance in hybrid multi cloud environments.
Want More Information About Our Services? Talk to Our Consultants!
Why Is Infrastructure Monitoring Essential For Businesses?
Infrastructure monitoring has become more essential as IT infrastructures have grown increasingly complex. All components - devices, servers, applications, storage systems, operating systems, and hardware - interact constantly.
Therefore, practical monitoring tools or strategies must exist for pinpointing problems early and solving them swiftly and effectively.
Monitoring infrastructure provides you with an invaluable real-time view of it and can assist your organization in meeting its goals.
By collecting and reviewing data about it regularly, IT monitoring tools allow you to track its overall progress as it moves along its journey toward its current state or goals; for instance, if your company sets out a goal of attaining certain levels of network responsiveness, they show where your network stands now as opposed to how it was before; you may identify spikes or lags which need diagnosing to inform future strategies that lead to network responsiveness goals being attained.
Monitoring your IT infrastructure can also assist in tracking the health and performance status of devices, helping identify imminent failures by analyzing their infrastructure and devices.
Here are two examples of potential consequences if infrastructure monitoring tools or strategies are left out of play:
- This causes servers to become zombies - inactive machines that consume energy without producing anything tangible in return - leading to wasted resources and energy usage.
- Your company could be vulnerable to malware infiltration. Malware infiltrators gain entry through compromised servers or websites and use these systems to send spam, send malicious payloads, and intercept network traffic in search of sensitive data. A solution that monitors infrastructure would alert you if an unknown application sent thousands of emails at once or communicated with servers.
What Data About Observability Should You Use To Make Your Decision?
Your infrastructure monitoring won't produce quality insights without using the appropriate tools and obtaining access to pertinent data sources, like these types of sources for observability:
- Metrics: Quantitative Data can provide visualizations that highlight patterns of performance over time and highlight specific instances or locations, with values expressed as counts or measurements over an extended period providing vital data needed for performing performance analyses or state-based analyses.
- Logs of Events: Systems and services generate logs that provide important insight into what's occurring and facilitate troubleshooting efforts.
- Distribution Traces: To gain an in-depth knowledge of how your environment interacts, distributed traces are an ideal way to document how transactions travel throughout an infrastructure.
- Metadata: Additional data such as topology, namespaces, and priority information will allow you to comprehend the impact and significance of events occurring within your infrastructure and their interaction with other components.
- UX Data: Acknowledging user experiences is critical in understanding your infrastructure's performance, such as page loading times and latency measurements. Gaining an in-depth view of their journey allows for adjustments as necessary and ultimately delivers better user satisfaction.
- Open Source Telemetry: Various open-source telemetry tools will assist in increasing observability across an environment. Industry-standard tools may include these in their arsenal of solutions.
- Modern infrastructure: typically incorporates cloud services. Integrations like Amazon Web Services' CloudWatch provide useful observability information that enables infrastructure monitoring.
Infrastructure Monitoring Best Practices
Follow some best practices when setting up and monitoring programs so that they provide maximum value. For instance:
- Automate your infrastructure monitoring: Expand your capabilities with infrastructure monitoring tools equipped with automation capabilities to gain end-to-end visibility of all stack parts and move towards AIOps infrastructure monitoring.
- Establish alerts with comprehensive coverage: While specific alerts will likely produce fewer false positives, comprehensive ones that provide redundancy are more likely to provide you with all the required data.
- Prioritize Alerts: Assign notifications based on user experience concerns with priority to avoid missing crucial ones.
- Develop dashboards tailored for specific roles: Infrastructure Monitoring tools provide you with a way to create dashboards customized to the needs of different teams within your organization, such as ITOps, security, or business units - so everyone has easy access to all the pertinent data at a single glance.
- Test Your Tools: As with any mission-critical system, any tools must be put through rigorous tests before becoming part of daily use. Plan a mock run of everything going as intended - this ensures a successful experience when everything falls into place as planned!
- Review metrics regularly: As your business goals and infrastructure adapt over time, so will its metrics and KPIs. Make a habit of reviewing them regularly to avoid creating blind spots within your infrastructure.
- Utilize Your Vendor's Expertise: Are you struggling with optimizing or tuning infrastructure monitoring during your organization's digital transformation? Please take advantage of the Knowledge and Expertise of Infrastructure Monitoring vendors. They have overseen deployment across many organizations and can assist you with reaching your monitoring goals faster.
Use Cases For Infrastructure Monitoring
Modern IT operations rely on infrastructure monitoring. Organizations can identify and resolve any potential issues before they lead to downtime or performance issues - thus ensuring the IT infrastructure functions at maximum efficiency.
Everyday use cases for monitoring include:
- Infrastructure Monitoring tools help network teams identify bottlenecks that affect performance by continuously tracking network traffic and other metrics and then addressing their root causes before any negative repercussions impact end users.
- Organizations can detect potential security threats and ensure their infrastructure complies with relevant regulations and standards to maintain compliance and its continued functionality.
- Tracking server health and utilization With these software tools, organizations are provided real-time insight into server utilization such as CPU utilization, memory consumption, and disk usage - providing real-time insight that enables organizations to identify any potential capacity issues to ensure application performance does not suffer.
- Capacity Planning and Optimization Organizations can identify areas needing additional resources to make informed decisions regarding allocating these assets for maximum efficiency with capacity planning and optimization.
- Monitoring Application Performance Companies can utilize performance measurements such as response times, transaction volumes, and error rates to quickly spot and address application performance problems before further problems emerge.
When Selecting An Infrastructure Monitoring System, What Should You Look For?
Traditional monitoring tools will no longer suffice as organizations transition to modern infrastructure. A single tool offers the best way to monitor cloud platforms, supporting applications, and infrastructure.
- Here are some features to look out for when choosing such an instrument:
- All-in-one platforms establish end-to-end IT visibility across application and infrastructure teams by offering all-encompassing visibility.
- AI assistance Artificial Intelligence can assist your IT team by benchmarking and detecting anomalies within your system so that they can focus on innovation, proactive actions and business results instead.
- Contextual Data Gain a more profound understanding of billions of interdependencies by going beyond metrics, logs and traces.
- Root-cause Analysis determines and takes immediate actions against problems at the code level to find practical solutions in real time.
- Automating large-scale dynamic environments includes discovery, instrumentation, baseline determination, and agent life cycle management.
- Coverage from end-to-end for hybrid cloud, from third-party integrations and multi-cloud support down to mainframes, virtualization on-prem, public cloud services providers and database vendors.
- Cloud-native Architectures support containers and serverless computing models and include open standards.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring: Challenges
Over recent years, IT infrastructure monitoring has grown increasingly significant, with complex environments to monitor.
Complexities must be effectively managed for applications and infrastructures to deliver optimal user experiences. IT infrastructure monitoring does more than check servers, networks, and systems are working correctly - its primary aim is addressing potential performance-degrading issues which might adversely impact quality-of-performance measures.
Key challenges related to monitoring IT include elements in particular:
- Entire infrastructure
- Multi cloud environments
- Business transactions
- Intelligent automation
- Protocol failures
- Virtual machine
What Is The Purpose Of IT Infrastructure Monitoring?
IT monitoring covers many disciplines, including infrastructure monitoring. These disciplines may include IT operations management, application performance monitoring (APM), security information and events management (SIEM), orchestration automation response and response, and security orchestration automation response and response, among many more.
To maximize results from monitoring efforts, you should create an IT monitoring hypothesis which describes your goals: for instance, it might simply mean being alerted when servers go offline while for something like containers, microservices IoT architecture is deployed properly - these present challenges which must be tackled effectively before tools may even start being selected to monitor infrastructure monitoring activities properly:
- Single source
- Precise root
- Server monitoring
- Application environment
- Application Security
Select the Monitoring Solution Best Suited To Your Business
Monitoring tools for IT infrastructures can generally be divided into three categories: observational, analytical, and engagement monitoring solutions.
The first is designed to monitor hardware, software, and services to assess their operational effectiveness and efficiency. They can conduct deeper analyses by looking more deeply at data to isolate the cause of problems or, with AIOps systems (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations), predict where issues might emerge based on past patterns and trends.
Once previous tools have generated the information, engagement tools will take action by sending alerts directly to analysts or managers and automatically activating services, such as performing backups or restarting software or hardware, when they detect something amiss.
The Business Impact Of IT Infrastructure Monitoring
Monitoring IT Infrastructure A key challenge associated with monitoring IT infrastructure is engaging top management in its operations.
Though technical executives might seem like the obvious candidates to lead IT infrastructure monitoring programs, Their contributions could highlight specific needs that IT infrastructure monitoring should fulfill.
Effective Monitoring Monitoring of systems has an enormously positive effect on business. Monitoring systems are proven to save costs by shortening problem resolution times; customer experiences improve as expected performance meets or exceeds customer expectations; and performance monitoring should also be employed during app development to avoid unexpected issues after launch:
- Underlying infrastructure
- Entire IT infrastructure
- Network infrastructure
Data Source: Log Management, Agent Software
Figuring out data sources used in IT infrastructure monitoring deliberating what data will be utilized for IT Infrastructure Monitoring involves many activities that must co-occur.
Log management tools offer full traceability of IT events, aggregate and analyze collected information to maintain compliance and security, or monitor business processes. Installing agent software agents onto the server for performance metrics collection might be one traditional means.
However, agentless models also exist - the critical thing is selecting which method best meets the company's requirements.
Five Trends In IT Infrastructure Monitoring
Monitoring IT infrastructure has seen rapid expansion since businesses rely on devices, servers, networks and other IT forms to generate income.
Here are five IT Infrastructure Monitoring Trends we frequently discuss with our clients and should keep their IT teams aware of:
Rapid Shift Towards Hybrid Environments
Hybrid environments are becoming a prevalent trend within businesses and increasingly critical, taking over many IT departments that were traditionally solely accountable for on-premise infrastructures.
Cloud computing has long been associated with hosting business applications and data.
More and more businesses are seeing cloud services become the host for services previously located locally, such as communication tools or apps used for additional functionality like billing.
Businesses have long used Amazon Web Services to host their data warehouse and billing tool needs; more recently, they have also employed products to host these communication needs in the cloud.
Moving so many cloud services presents unique challenges; one slip-up could cause all services to go down simultaneously.
Businesses investing in on-premise storage as more services move to the cloud can give them better data control.
A hybrid environment has emerged by shifting away from cloud hosting and toward on-premises solutions. Businesses invest heavily in cloud computing; however, their data cannot reside exclusively with any one cloud vendor; IT teams now must oversee multiple cloud vendors and on-premise solutions, creating more complexity than ever.
It is vitally important that IT monitoring software supports hybrid environments to keep IT teams and monitoring teams informed.
Demand For Advanced Analytics And Reports
IT teams must remain vigilant in spotting issues before interfering with business operations. This includes monitoring IT systems closely as companies increasingly rely on IT for providing their products and services, generating revenue.
Many types of businesses, especially eCommerce ones, rely heavily on eCommerce tools as revenue generators if their physical stores close, as is often seen during COVID-19 closure periods; executives seek information regarding operational IT metrics as part of business decision-making processes. IT monitoring solutions require analytics and reporting to identify key metrics for these stakeholders and give context to what these mean for the business.
A monitoring solution must effectively capture data - be that IT performance data or sales figures, financial accounting details, or marketing analytics.
Businesses relying heavily on data analysis solutions are turning more frequently to this information to predict future IT issues - for instance, when devices reach capacity - but also gain additional intelligence for cross-functional teams and business intelligence purposes.
Businesses seek monitoring solutions capable of tracking any source for advanced analytics purposes.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring: Consolidation Into One Tool
Due to the limited capabilities of IT monitoring software, many businesses were forced to purchase multiple solutions to monitor their IT devices.
Over time, however, they realized MonitoringMonitoring could become complicated and ineffective if users must log into multiple tools so that they can keep tabs on what is taking place in each.
Trends indicate a growing desire among businesses to transition away from multi-tool MonitoringMonitoring of IT infrastructure to one tool that covers everything, such as servers, devices and networks - but businesses also seek solutions which monitor every component within a network - including servers, devices and networks themselves - plus offer multiple data input/output options for input/output needs.
IT teams require one consolidated view of their IT systems to evaluate and report their performance efficiently - by moving towards just one monitoring tool, they can better evaluate/report performance better.
IT Monitoring: Check Your Applications
IT teams increasingly monitor and report the performance of applications as businesses focus more on developing programs.
Instead of verifying whether a device or network is online and functional, IT teams now utilize more complex checks to ensure applications are operating optimally - another emerging IT trend. Utilizing monitoring tools allows your team to keep tabs on these developments easily and is also becoming popular within today's infrastructure.
Businesses could set up checks in their IT monitoring solution that ask specific applications to perform specific actions and then report back.
It could be as easy as opening an Excel document and asking "5+3" and then sending the results back for verification by an IT monitoring solution, or more complex, such as opening a proprietary program and checking its functionality correctly.
Proactively inspecting applications helps IT teams quickly identify problems while decreasing ticket numbers managed, helping reduce business disruptions during crises where IT teams must quickly support business change initiatives.
Monitoring devices alone is no longer sufficient to manage an IT infrastructure effectively; IT monitoring solutions must now also monitor and report the performance of applications due to increased emphasis on their development.
Cybersecurity And Compliance Gain Greater Priority
IT teams continue to prioritize cybersecurity when considering network safety, with IT infrastructure monitoring becoming a more prominent trend.
According to digital research, approximately 80 percent of technology executives admit they cannot keep pace with sophisticated attackers who target IT networks.
IT teams need access to all information logged by tools to correctly identify internal threats, monitor devices and networks for abnormal activity (e.g.
a spike of failed password attempts), inform senior leadership of any abnormal activities that arise as quickly as possible, and receive alerts as necessary so they can react swiftly against potential risks.
Executives also desire access to this data as cybersecurity threatens critical business metrics and operations, increasing their need for executive-level reporting and analytics.
IT environments change at an incredible speed; IT teams that stay informed on current trends in infrastructure monitoring are better prepared to lead their businesses towards future success.
Want More Information About Our Services? Talk to Our Consultants!
Conclusion
This concern lacks substance since most IT infrastructure monitoring solutions now come as SaaS services (Software as a Service), eliminating any requirement for specialist knowledge.
