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Gaining a Comprehensive Overview of IT Operations
Life Without Enterprise Monitoring and Management
More often than not, enterprise monitoring and management is a touchy subject—at least in the planning stages. It’s often a solution that goes unimplemented until some sort of business crisis occurs as a result of technology failure. It could start with a panicked 2:00 AM phone call from a customer, or some other related business entity who depends on a particular service that is no longer working. Once the fire starts, a customer may call the owner or principal manager of an organization in a rage, wanting to know why no one from IT is trying to figure out why an SLA wasn’t upheld. It’s not a pretty picture. IT personnel go into triage mode, which is usually organized chaos at best. The objective is to stop the bleeding and bring business back into operations.
It usually only takes one or two crisis events for management to decide that more proactive measures need to be taken to prevent customer dissatisfaction and potential negative impacts to revenue. The time comes to discuss enterprise monitoring and management, and understand the inner workings of IT services holistically.
An IT failure that causes a business outage could come from any number of malfunctions: a bank may not be able to get money to a customer, or perhaps an online retailer experiences a payment dysfunction. Whatever the underlying technical issue, there are impacts on both the sides of the business and customer:
- Network stops working
- Storage has filled up and disk is too full
- A system is over-utilized from a CPU perspective
- An environmental issue, such as AC failure, caused overheating
- Application stack crashes
The Top 3 Enterprise Monitoring and Management Solutions Recommended by August Schell
Enterprise monitoring and management enables the ability to understand your IT environment and the general health of technology components that are specifically mapped to the functions of your business. It’s the act of specifying the questions you’re asking about IT operations, and taking quality control from “Is my server or application running okay?” to “As a business, if I’m providing a service, how do I know it’s optimally performing the way that I expect, and the way that my customers expect?”
At August Schell, we work with a number of enterprise monitoring and management solutions. Below we’ve listed the top 3 we most commonly recommend to our customers.
- Splunk for IT Operations: Splunk software collects and correlates machine data and uses it to so you can troubleshoot issues and outages, monitor end-to-end service levels, and detect anomalies, enabling end-to-end visibility across IT infrastructure and faster time to resolution.
- Reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) through fast, data-driven troubleshooting.
- Proactively monitor infrastructure by correlating events throughout diverse machine data.
- Enhance IT service monitoring with analytics delivered by Splunk IT Service Intelligence (Splunk ITSI).
- Eliminate silos by integrating data throughout infrastructure and systems.
- Detect anomalies and prevent glitches in real time.
- Nagios: Nagios XI delivers monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components, including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Nagios XI also allows hundreds of third-party add-ons, which provides monitoring for virtually all in-house applications, services, and systems.
- Comprehensive IT Infrastructure Monitoring
- Performance
- Visibility
- Proactive Planning & Awareness
- Customizability
- Ease of Use
- Multi-Tenant Capabilities
- Extendable Architecture
- Tanium: Tanium gives businesses and government organizations the ability to secure, control, and manage millions of endpoints within seconds. Tanium functions as the “central nervous system” for enterprises, allowing security and IT operations to ask questions about the state of every endpoint, retrieve data on their current and past state, and execute change as necessary, all within seconds.
- Ask a question using natural language with Google-like search functionality.
- Retrieve answers instantaneously to gain visibility into the current state of endpoints.
- Take action at scale and change millions of endpoints as needed in seconds.
Partnering with August Schell for Implementing Enterprise Monitoring and Management
At August Schell, we regularly partner with federal and commercial organizations to implement effective enterprise monitoring and management solutions. We understand that in order to keep your data center operating smoothly, you need to integrate all operational data points to create a single view for making intelligent technology solutions. We published an eBook to help you out!
If your organization is interested in learning more about how enterprise monitoring and management can help protect your business, reach out to an August Schell specialist, or call us at (301)-838-9470.
Free eBook: 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Monitoring and Management
Enterprise monitoring and management can be a tricky subject because it’s often a solution that goes unimplemented until some sort of business crisis occurs as a result of technology failure.
