Managing large-scale deployments efficiently and resolving issues in a timely manner can be an easy task. What you need is a reliable and agile set of infrastructure monitoring tools for your enterprise IT infrastructure that possesses all the needed features for simple and stress-free management.

The problem of using separate IT infrastructure monitoring tools to ensure your environment monitoring and reliability

Choosing infrastructure monitoring software for your Windows or Linux servers, applications, databases or VMs is one of the major steps an organization takes when scaling up. Companies strive to optimize the business processes and achieve better results from the operating systems. By selecting an advanced infrastructure monitoring and management tool they are trying to prevent service degradation and service disruption, such as outages, system latency, etc.

Using different software to monitor your systems and applications causes bottlenecks and overload on everyday workflow

When building their monitoring and reporting stack, companies often start with a minimalistic supervising system that offers basic metrics reporting. Later they tend to up their game with other infrastructure monitoring and alerting services in order to face the growing need for better IT management. That could only lead to implementing lots of different monitoring and reporting software, having different accounts on various monitoring platforms, and purchasing multiple licenses. 

The result is a massive overload on the technical teams, interruption of the working process, and increase of the mundane operations. System administrators strongly rely on tools for infrastructure monitoring to provide seamless support to the systems and all critical workloads and applications that are operating in the environment. Having various monitoring tools creates bottlenecks and performance issues in their everyday workflow.

Lack or overlap of features when using different IT monitoring tools

Some of the legacy monitoring tools don’t offer the needed features for effective management and control. In this situation, administrators add other monitoring software or tools to fill in the gap. Finally, you end up with several solutions implemented, which are having similar functionalities, but none of them is enough to cover your needs. 

At the same time, some monitoring tools become less reliable with time. Even worse, you might be paying for features that you are not using at all. But why do organizations keep using legacy infrastructure monitoring services when it’s neither comfortable or beneficial? 

Consolidation of monitoring services for scaling companies

Optimizing the monitoring and reporting is one of the most important parts when companies grow. Companies strive for better stability and reliability for their services that can only be achieved with proactive monitoring, alerting systems, and a simple reporting platform all in one place – a consolidated infrastructure monitoring platform that answers all their business needs.

The end of legacy monitoring software with the easy implementation of latest generation monitoring system in a single package

Adopting a single monitoring platform is a must for modern enterprises. With the implementation of the latest infrastructure monitoring best practices, technical teams become more agile. Everything they need is in one place and they get used to the monitoring platform quickly.

According to Opsview’s State of IT Infrastructure Survey Report 2019, 27.8% of surveyed companies say that they understand that a centralized approach to IT monitoring can help and prevent any potential issues. 29.6% say that the business understands that IT OPS (IT Operations Perceptions) and effective IT monitoring underpins business growth and innovation. When asked about the changes they have made in the past years, only 7% respond that their organization is still structured in a legacy way in terms of people, process and tech which adds to the problem of managing complexity and supporting digital transformation.

Technology is evolving and at the same time so do scaling companies. 

How to choose a highly efficient and advanced monitoring and reporting suite

There are many tools you can choose from that offer different infrastructure monitoring benefits and advantages. So let’s find out what are the most important monitoring features and performance indicators that every organization needs to consider: 

• Fully integrated with public, private or hybrid clouds, VMs, Windows or Linux servers, applications, databases, etc.;
• Advanced cloud performance monitoring;
• Network traffic monitoring and auditing;
• Storage latency monitoring;
• Full control and maximum agility;
• Tracking changes, tracking and monitoring inventory;
• Advanced alerts and notifications system for technical issues prevention;
• Ease of deployment and simplicity;
• And many others you can find in the modern infrastructure monitoring tools.

Agentless vs. Agent Monitoring

There is something really important that needs to be taken into account before you choose an IT infrastructure monitoring service. Whether you are searching for an application monitoring technology, virtualization monitoring software, cloud monitoring tool, or else, you need to know that there are two types of consolidated monitoring services available: agentless and agent-based monitoring. 

With agent-based monitoring, you will have to install, maintain, and operate your monitoring software on all instances you are monitoring. In this case, you’ll have to be sure that all the IT monitoring services you are using are compatible with each other. Also, agent-based services are usually proprietary and if you decide to change the monitoring system you might experience severe data loss and other issues with the migration. Not only that but it needs a great deal of support – having agent-based monitoring requires maintenance efforts to keep the agents up to date when a new version is available so that it won’t cause any problems.

Agentless infrastructure monitoring is way simpler. You don’t need to install the software on all your instances and that makes the updating of your IT infrastructure monitoring software way easier. It uses various protocols (SSH, SNMP, NetFlow, WMI,etc.) to relay the analytics statistics and system data to the infrastructure monitoring software. That is why you don’t need to install agents on all your IT inventory and would still be able to gather important system data and statistics in one place. 

Infrastructure Monitoring Best Practices Start with Cost Control

It’s important to rationalize the spending on your IT infrastructure monitoring and reporting stack and find the right balance between overspending and underspending for these services. Having all the needed features in a single package in an exclusive consolidated monitoring product would help you greatly in this task. You’ll be able to get all the important statistics and system data, get the maximum out of the needed features and will cut the cost for paying for different software licenses.

Moreover, it’s important to select a service that supports different inventory items at the same time which would additionally optimize the cost of the monitoring service. This means that if you have a virtualized environment, different applications, private, public, or hybrid clouds, servers, and different storage spaces, it’s best to choose an IT monitoring software that offers a consolidated monitoring system and reporting for all of them. Using Infrastructure Monitoring as a Services solution, which is cloud-based is also an option. 

VirtualMetric – All-in-one monitoring solution

VirtualMetric is a leader in providing best of class IT infrastructure services to enterprises of all sizes around the globe. Its advanced tools and features are compatible with bare-storage, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware modules, supports hybrid, private and public clouds environments, Microsoft and Linux servers, and provides application monitoring, Microsoft SQL database monitoring, virtualization monitoring, and advanced security analytics.

VirtualMetric Dashboard

With VirtualMetric you can upgrade your business processes with the latest monitoring technology that offers management workload automation, better cost management, and exceptional performance monitoring and maximum availability of your operations, applications, and services. You’ll benefit from the advanced real-time monitoring and proactive alerting features, inventory reporting, etc.

In addition, VirtualMetric infrastructure monitoring tools are completely agentless meaning it collects all log files, notifications, systems data, statistics, reports, etc, in a single platform. There is no need to stick to the legacy monitoring tools of the last century. Choose a leading infrastructure monitoring software for your scaling business. Get a 30-days free trial all features included!