We estimate that well over 50% of IT issues are first discovered by the customer. That means your IT resources are spending significant time reacting to problems when they could be preventing them. Proactive IT monitoring can help better utilize IT resources, reduce IT operating costs and deliver higher service levels.
Proactive IT Monitoring Improves IT Resource Allocation
While it’s impossible to completely eliminate problem solving, reducing the number of problems in the first place allows you to leverage your IT resources to prevent problems instead of reacting to them. It can be extremely challenging, however, to maintain service levels, when your IT resources are troubleshooting problems. Automation, for example, is one way to free up IT support staff. One of our managed service provider clients applied Nimsoft Monitor to automate level-1 tickets and reduce their operating expenses.
Resource allocation is also a function of IT organizational structure. Many IT production environments are structured into silos that disintegrate IT monitoring and make it difficult to transform from a reactive problem-solving mode to a proactive preventive mode. More recently, IT monitoring applications are enabling end-to-end service visibility into disparate IT networks, which helps mitigate the downside of silos.
Benchmarking Brings Cost Effective IT Monitoring
Whether enterprise IT organization or managed service provider, we’ve seen a competitive advantage to baselining and benchmarking the state of your IT infrastructure, transactions and applications. Why go through the added expense of maintaining five nines uptime when two nines will do? And is your infrastructure capable of handling the customer’s requirement? Baselining and benchmarking enable you to develop a more relevant and cost-effective Service Level Agreement based on the state of your current network, applicable metrics and industry good practice. Then, you can establish an IT monitoring profile and allocate resources commensurate with benchmarking data. For example, let’s say you’re providing IT services for a financial organization. Aside from server uptime and reliability, latency, relative to business applications and processes, is a key performance metric. With a unified monitoring system, you can monitor both server and application levels to the required performance. The key here is visibility across your network. Visibility not only lets you monitor the current health of your IT services, but also predict potential problem areas and respond before a problem arises.
Predictive IT Monitoring Improves Service Levels
If networks and IT infrastructure stood still, problem-solving would become a lesson learned and you would make sure the problem didn’t reoccur. We all know that’s a pipe dream! Today’s IT environments are more dynamic than ever. A problem solved today may reoccur in the future as a result of a change elsewhere in your environment. Unified IT monitoring provides forensic data to help you get to the root cause of an existing issue, but it also provides trending data that can help you predict and mitigate potential issues. Imagine a world where you could not only predict problems before they occur, but also plan your resources accordingly. You don’t have to imagine… it’s possible now. Unified IT monitoring does more than troubleshoot problems after your customers report them. This same IT monitoring data can be captured and applied in a predictive network management approach… and that’s simply a function of analyzing the right reports and taking action before an issue is ever reported.
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