Organizations rely on their IT infrastructure to be up and running at all times. Downtime can cost companies big money in lost productivity, so it's critical to have the plan to monitor your infrastructure's health.
Many aspects of IT infrastructure need to be monitored, including servers, storage, networking, and applications. In addition, each one of these components has its own set of performance metrics that need to be tracked.
A comprehensive infrastructure monitoring strategy will help you monitor these areas and identify issues before they cause downtime. The proper monitoring tools can also help you troubleshoot problems more quickly and avoid outages altogether.
Different types of infrastructure monitoring
Various infrastructure monitoring tools are available, each designed to monitor different aspects of your infrastructure. Here are some of the most popular types of infrastructure monitoring tools.
Network monitoring tools — Monitor network traffic and performance.
Server monitoring tools — monitor server performance, including CPU utilization, memory usage, and disk activity.
Application monitoring tools — Monitor the performance of applications, including response time, error rates, and transaction times.
Database monitoring tools — Monitor database performance, including queries per second, response times, and deadlocks.
Five steps for a winning infrastructure monitoring strategy
1. Define your goals
As with any business initiative, defining your goals is the first step to take when planning your infrastructure monitoring strategy. What are you hoping to achieve by implementing this strategy? Are you looking to improve uptime? Reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR)? Get better visibility into your system performance? Once you know your goals, you can start planning how to achieve them.
If improving uptime is one of your primary goals, you'll want to focus on identifying and addressing potential issues before they cause downtime. This might involve setting up alerts, so you're notified as soon as an issue arises or implementing a proactive monitoring solution to help you identify potential problems before they cause disruptions.
Similarly, if reducing MTTR is a crucial goal, you'll want to identify and resolve issues when they arise quickly. This could involve setting up multiple monitoring tools to get real-time data from multiple sources or investing in a resolution management solution that can automate and streamline the incident resolution process.
2. Choose the right tools
The next step is to choose the right tools for your monitoring strategy. There are a few key factors to consider when making this decision.
- What type of data do you need to collect?
- How much data do you need to collect?
- How often do you need to collect data?
- What is your budget for monitoring tools?
Once you have answered these questions, you can begin researching different monitoring tools that will fit your needs. There are various open-source and commercial options available, so be sure to shop around and compare features and prices before making your final decision.
3. Collect and analyze data
The third step in developing a winning infrastructure monitoring strategy is to collect and analyze data. This data can come from various sources, including server logs, application performance data, and network activity data. Once this data has been collected, it must be analyzed to identify potential issues and areas for improvement.
Many tools available can help with this process, including data visualization tools that can help identify patterns and trends. Once the data has been analyzed, it is essential to develop plans to address any identified issues. This may involve changes to configuring systems or additional monitoring tools and processes.
4. Implement changes
Now that you've decided on which changes to make to your infrastructure monitoring strategy, it's time to implement them. This can be daunting, but breaking it down into smaller steps can make it more manageable.
To start, look at your current monitoring tools and see if they need to be updated or replaced. If you're using open-source tools, new versions may be available. Alternatively, you may need to switch to commercial tools if your current ones need to be updated to the task.
Once you have the right tools, it's time to start making changes to your infrastructure. If you're adding new monitors, ensure they're correctly configured and tested before putting them into production. And, if you're making changes to existing monitors, be sure to test those. No one wants their monitoring system to go off false alarms!
Finally, remember to document everything. Keeping detailed records of what was changed and when will help you troubleshoot any issues that come up down the road. It will also be helpful if you need to go back and make further changes in the future.
5. Evaluate and adjust your strategy
After monitoring your infrastructure for a while, evaluating and adjusting your strategy is essential. This will help ensure that you can continue to monitor your system effectively and identify any potential issues.
When evaluating and adjusting your monitoring strategy, make sure that you are collecting the correct data. As your system changes, you may need to adjust what data you are collecting to continue monitoring your infrastructure effectively. The same goes for alerts and trigger thresholds.
Conclusion
Organizations need to have a winning infrastructure monitoring strategy to succeed. By monitoring the infrastructure, organizations can identify issues and problems early on, saving time and money in the long run. A good monitoring strategy will also help organizations improve their overall performance and ensure that their systems run smoothly.
