I think most IT professionals will agree that while the majority of outages are preventable with a robust IT monitoring solution in place, some outages are inevitable. Robust IT monitoring can help guard against preventable IT outages and mitigate loss and downtime associated with rare though possible outages.

1. Agent optional monitoring – IT monitoring of network devices and “black box” systems—SAN storage, cloud environments SaaS and IaaS—usually doesn’t permit agents. Look for a monitoring solution that not only allows for agentless monitoring, but also enables deep integration with the popular management interfaces that monitor these environments.

    

2. Automation – the risk of an outage increases as changes occur in your infrastructure. An automated discovery and deployment engine can reduce the risk. So whether you physical or virtual environment changes, make sure your system can automatically discover new environments or components, apply the appropriate monitoring profile (agent or agentless) and automatically update the CMDB.

    

3. Performance management – spotting trends before an issue arises is often the result of monitoring historical data. A performance management database (PMDB) can give you a broader performance perspective of your network and help you pinpoint problems before they occur.

    

4. Flexibility – out-of-the-box monitoring solutions let you quickly and easily deploy a monitoring solution based on common infrastructure characteristics. However, for added outage protection, you may require customization. Make sure your IT monitoring solution gives you the flexibility to do so. Let’s say you want to develop a custom monitoring agent. Your monitoring solution should offer SDKs as well as APIs for additional customization at various levels within your infrastructure.

    

5. Visibility to the right data – most IT monitoring solutions have dashboards and alarm consoles; however, they don’t all aggregate alarm, performance and event data to give you a clearer picture of risk as well as outage potential. What analysts need in addition to alarms is actionable data within the context of the alarm.

    

Though the majority of outages can be prevented, even the most robust networks have mishaps from time to time. Check out these major network snafus. If nothing else, you won’t feel so bad when you experience your next outage. But don’t wait for an outage, talk to a Nimsoft Expert now and learn how IT monitoring can help prevent or mitigate an outage.