What is IT Infrastructure Monitoring?
When hard disk space is “suddenly” low, when servers “somehow” seem to be laggy, then it is high time for a monitoring system.
Just like a aircraft pilot…
Are all engines running?
How much fuel do we have?
How is the cabin pressure?
… also an IT administrator needs to know all vital data of the company’s IT environment:
Are the server processes running?
How ist the uplink bandwidth usage?
How much RAM, how much hard disk space is free?
A monitoring system like Checkmk gathers such vital data around the clock. It compares them with thresholds and sends out alarms if servers are going offline, prozesses are crashing or metrics are leaving their normal range.
Reasons for IT infrasturcture monitoring
There are many good reasons to implement an IT infrastructure monitoring system:
- Ensuring availability and continuity
- Inventoring all IT components
- Continuous monitoring and reliable notifications about failures
- Proactive detection of critical conditions
- SLA Reporting
- Recurring generation of reports, e.g. for capacity planning or 3rd party providers
Added value of IT infrastructure monitoring
IT infrastructure monitoring systems generate alarms for:
- Operational state of Windows-/Linux servers (etc.)
- Crashed server processes
- Bandwidth problems
- Ressource problems (CPU/RAM/Disk)
- Storage state, UPS, diesel aggregates, …
- Expiring certificates
- Availability of network ports/APIS (e.g. REST, SOAP, … )
- Cloud services
- Storage systems
- Enduser-Experience (see E2E-Monitoring)
- and much more (see https://checkmk.com/de/integrations)
IT monitoring is an indispensable tool for a smooth operation.
Don’t reinvent the wheel
Monitoring projects with ELABIT are following the best-practice approach:
- implement what has been proven
- realize what is special