Monitoring – Effective business tool or necessary evil?

Monitoring is too often seen as a necessary evil instead of an enabler to improve the IT business and facilitate improved uptime.

Monitoring is actually one of the most important functions for IT operations as it makes your systems much more reliable – you cannot manage what you cannot measure.

While monitoring is an essential function that can help you proactively identify potential issues before they escalate into incidents and outages, it can be challenging to implement effectively.

As each hardware and software vendor typically has vendor-specific monitoring software, it becomes complex to trend across system components.

As a result, monitoring is often ignored, and IT relies on end users to tell them that a particular system is not working.

Increased digitisation has brought about increased monitoring requirements to ensure that the digitised elements are working effectively.

With an increase in devices, such as Raspberry Pi, the scope of monitoring is becoming practically endless.

A shift to cloud computing, and the associated criticality of connectivity, requires very specific monitoring; many organisations take the view that monitoring becomes less important when services are moved to the cloud.

However, a move to cloud services simply moves the point of monitoring, not the requirement to monitor, especially if you hope to track whether your cloud provider is giving you what you are paying for.

Total Monitoring Solutions sells, maintains and supports a system monitoring product called PRTG, which has over 150,000 customers globally – many of which are South African.

PRTG monitors all systems, devices, traffic and applications of your IT infrastructure using these technologies:

• SNMP: ready to use and custom options
• WMI and Windows Performance Counters
• SSH: for Linux/Unix and MacOS systems
• Flows and Packet Sniffing
• HTTP requests
• Ping, SQL, and many more

Everything you need is contained in one simple installer, and no additional downloads are required.

With PRTG, Total Monitoring Solutions has helped South African businesses of all sizes enjoy the benefits of monitoring their environments.

Download PRTG for free to finally know what your network is doing.