Useful dashboards can elevate data analysis tasks, and bridge the gap between data and action. Viewers should be able to look at a dashboard and go, “I understand what’s going on and exactly what I need to do now.”
Published Date: January 31, 2023
IT monitoring is the name for the products and processes used to determine if an organization’s information technology (IT) equipment and services are working properly and to detect and help resolve problems. IT monitoring tools can include everything from basic tools to more advanced solutions that use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict and prevent outages before they occur. With the cost of IT downtime averaging $5,600 per minute according to a Gartner estimate, IT monitoring is more important than ever before.
The practice of IT monitoring has evolved significantly in recent years, in large part because IT environments have become significantly more complex. One major change in IT monitoring came with the growing popularity of cloud computing. IT monitoring tools are now designed to monitor both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructures.
IT monitoring has a large crossover with other related disciplines, including IT operations management (ITOM), operational intelligence (OI), observability, security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) and security information and event management (SIEM).
In this article, we’ll talk about the basic principles and types of IT monitoring, the tools that are used and the ways that IT monitoring works with other disciplines including network performance and management, DevOps and automation. We’ll also explore how to choose an effective IT monitoring strategy for your organization.
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What are the basic types of IT monitoring?
There isn’t an official list of all the types of IT monitoring and when it comes to tools and practices there is often a significant amount of overlap. With that in mind, we’ll take a look at some of the basic types of IT monitoring.
- Availability monitoring: Also known as system monitoring, this is one of the most mature flavors of IT monitoring, keeping track of basic system performance metrics such as uptime and performance. Availability monitoring can also be applied to server management, infrastructure monitoring and management and network monitoring and management.
- Web performance monitoring: This is a subset of availability monitoring specifically designed to monitor the availability of a web server. Web performance monitoring tools track metrics including page load time, errors and where they occur and load times of individual web elements. Web performance metrics are essential to help analysts not only ensure that the web server and the websites it serves are up and running, but are also performing to customers’ expectations.
- Application management/application performance management (APM): APM tools are similar to web performance monitoring tools, but they’re designed with customer-facing applications in mind, allowing analysts to track the performance of an application and spot any issues before they become too severe for the user base. More modern APM tools can include automated routines to troubleshoot these issues without the intervention of a human developer.
- API monitoring: Enterprises that offer APIs to third-party developers will find it crucial to ensure the uptime of these services. API monitoring tools and monitoring software provide insight into whether an API or integration is working properly, ensuring minimal downtime.
- Real user monitoring (RUM): Real user monitoring is designed to record actual end-user interactions with a website or application. By monitoring real-world load times and user behavior, it can pinpoint problems based on “real” user experience challenges, as opposed to simulations. This type of monitoring is designed to be backward-looking, not predictive, allowing analysts to spot problems only after they occurred.
- Security monitoring: While security monitoring is a subset of IT monitoring, it is a highly specialized form of IT monitoring designed to detect breaches in security or other unusual network activity.
Learn more about SIEM in the Data Insider article on the topic or take a deep dive into cloud SIEM in the Data Insider article here.
- Business activity monitoring: In the same way that IT metrics can help determine the health of IT systems, the same data can be analyzed to help determine the health of business performance metrics, including sales, application downloads, the volume of web traffic or any chosen business activity that generates machine data
Security IT monitoring is used to observe threats and suspicious activity in the network.
What types of tools are used in IT monitoring?
IT infrastructure monitoring tools can be broken down into three general categories or types of network devices — observational, analysis and engagement — based on how they’re used:
- Observational tools: These are the most basic types of IT monitoring tools, used to observe hardware, software or services and report back on their operational effectiveness. Most availability monitoring tools, including infrastructure monitoring and management tools, application performance monitoring tools, and web performance monitoring tools fall into this category.
- Analysis tools: This type of IT monitoring tool is tasked with taking observational data and analyzing it further. This data may be analyzed to determine where problems are originating or more critically, to determine why those problems might be occurring. Modern analytical tools, including artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) tools, can predict problems before they arise, based on patterns found in historical data.
- Engagement tools: As the final tier of IT monitoring tools, engagement tools are designed to act upon information created by both analysis and observational tools. This may take a simple form, in the case of service tickets or alerts that are intelligently delivered to the appropriate analyst or business manager, or more commonly, be used to spin up additional services, reboot troublesome hardware or software, or run backups.
How do IT monitoring and management work together?
IT monitoring tools provide the information necessary for IT teams to understand how their systems are performing, both in the moment and over time, and thus to determine the actions they take to effectively manage their networks, systems and devices and make both short and long-term decisions.
Let’s take a look at a specific example. Suppose the IT monitoring solution indicates that a device or service is experiencing 0.11% downtime and that 0.11% downtime translates to 11 minutes of unavailability per week. During prime business hours, 11 minutes in which the system is unable to process payments may have significant cost. How does this compare to the cost of replacing a memory card in the server or upgrading the network to avert that downtime? Or is there a process issue that should be addressed to resolve the problem? If downtime is increasing, a savvy manager may deduce that even greater trouble is on the horizon, and may use the IT monitoring data to make the case for replacing or upgrading existing hardware.
How does IT monitoring work with DevOps?
IT monitoring has an increasingly important role in the realm of DevOps, mainly because DevOps revolves around the concept of multiple-team collaboration, particularly development and operations. But more and more, enterprises have found even greater benefits when other departments are drawn into this mix, including security and QA/testing teams. Only when all of these groups work together as a cohesive team can a software or service product launch be successful.
IT monitoring is a natural complement to this concept, particularly relevant for products that rely on high availability, such as a cloud-based service or an app that relies on your company’s API. When these services slow down or crash altogether, customer satisfaction, and possibly revenue, can drop to zero. As such, it’s critical for DevOps teams to work to ensure that critical systems remain operational and responsive, and to build these measurements of performance directly into the development process from the start.
Another place DevOps and IT monitoring overlap is with regard to the increasing pace of product updates, as applications sometimes are updated several times a day. Monitoring is essential in these types of environments, as the breakneck pace of development often provides minimal time for quality assurance before a new update goes live. In some cases, an undiscovered bug makes it into production, causing a key system to experience an unacceptable slow down or crash. With a solid, real-time IT monitoring solution in place, these errors can be detected quickly, often within seconds, allowing the DevOps team to remedy the problem immediately, or roll back the code to a known working state, minimizing downtime.
That said, in the world of DevOps, IT monitoring is also forward-looking. DevOps monitoring systems can be tasked to monitor the very tools that developers use in their own work, helping managers spot areas that are inefficient or that could benefit from automation.
What is the difference between IT Monitoring and Observability?
IT monitoring and observability are both fundamental to DevOps, and they are both distinct practices. Put simply, observability is only made possible through monitoring. But, whereas monitoring might tell an IT team that a problem exists, observability gives a team visibility into operating systems across the entire enterprise, and thus is able to tell the team why a problem happened so they can prevent it from happening again.
(You can learn more about Splunk Observability, the only full-stack, analytics-powered and OpenTelemetry-native observability solution on our product page here.)
IT monitoring is an increasingly important component of DevOps because it requires multiple-team collaboration.
How do IT monitoring and automation work together?
IT monitoring and automation work together in a variety of ways, from automating the process of creating alerts and service tickets all the way to automatically remediating problems without requiring a human to be involved.
The more complex the infrastructure, the more necessary automation becomes. In enterprises of even modest size, there are simply too many moving parts for humans to manage, which becomes even more complicated with hybrid systems that combine both cloud and on-premises networks.
IT monitoring tools that incorporate automation are designed to simplify all of this. If a server is slowing down in response to a sudden burst of customer activity, the tool may diagnose the problem as an overloaded CPU, and could automatically instruct another server (real or virtual) to take over. When network traffic decreases, it may then decide to spin down that second server. The tool also has the ability to issue a root cause report about the incident so that management can decide whether an upgrade is in order.
How do analysts use IT monitoring?
IT monitoring tools are used in a wide variety of ways by analysts, and there’s no canonical guidance for exactly how they should be utilized. That said, in broad terms, analysts use IT monitoring tools to execute a plethora of critical functions, such as:
- Monitoring and troubleshooting physical and virtual infrastructure nodes, including servers, network hardware and cloud-based systems, allowing issues to be quickly resolved.
- Monitoring applications running in real-time to ensure uptime and speed development in a DevOps environment.
- Improving the IT decision-making process by making it easier to identify bottlenecks, bandwidth hogs, and other potential trouble spots in the network environment.
- Upgrading visibility into cloud-based systems and integrating monitoring with on-premises systems.
- Predicting and analyzing the impact of IT operations on the business, including financial impact.
- Automating incident management to reduce the need for human oversight — reducing response time and avoiding alert fatigue.
- Tracking end-user behaviors within an application to identify opportunities for improvement.
IT monitoring tools are used in a variety of ways by analysts.
How do you choose an IT monitoring strategy?
If you’re ready to launch your own IT monitoring strategy, here’s a step-by-step guide to getting started.
- Determine your goals: Do you merely want to be alerted if a single server goes down, or do you need to keep tabs on a hybrid environment that involves on-premises hardware and cloud services? Do you want to integrate your monitoring tool with other services? Do you want visibility into specific performance data? Do you want to use machine learning technology to automate corrective actions? The answers to these questions will greatly impact the complexity of monitoring tools you should consider.
- Bring business leaders on board: In conjunction with step 1, you’ll want to involve stakeholders outside the IT organization to get buy-in on their IT monitoring goals as well. Consolidate these needs with IT’s monitoring needs to create a single list of goals.
- Identify key features you need: Most monitoring tools offer basic features like reporting and visualization via dashboards, but they vary in sophistication. If you have a special need for data retention, or want real-time, machine learning-driven insights, these types of features will also point the way to their own particular solutions.
- Identify data sources that can be used: These data sources can range from servlogs to machine data to third-party data sources. Whatever you’re trying to monitor, there should be at least one relevant data source that relates to it. Enumerate all of these sources so you can ensure that any tool you consider supports the desired information.
- Evaluate tools on a trial basis: Armed with all of this, you needn’t jump in whole hog with the first IT monitoring provider that sounds like a good fit. Most of these tools are available on a trial basis, so you can see how well they will work in your environment before you pull the trigger. This is particularly true for tools that are offered as a service, on a subscription basis.
What are the best practices for IT monitoring?
IT monitoring is an enormous task and in order to be successful it helps to follow some best practices, including being careful with the way alerts are set up, creating dashboards to help streamline your monitoring, embracing redundancy and keeping your eyes open for anomalies and outliers.
- Be careful when setting up alerts: “Alert fatigue” is a real phenomenon in which too many alerts overwhelm your IT team and can actually cause them to tune out and miss critical information. Be sure to design a system and cadence that doesn’t alert and distract the team when it isn’t necessary for them to be involved.
- Categorize alerts by level of severity: Some lower-severity alerts can be routed to junior analysts (or potentially handled automatically) whereas more severe alerts should be routed immediately to senior analysts with an alert to management. Create alerting levels that involve the right people at the right time.
- Determine how alerts should be delivered: Alerts can be delivered by email, by text or other mobile notifications, or by phone. In the same way that you assign the response to different levels of alert by severity, make sure the type of alert that goes along with it is appropriate.
- Spend the time to perfect your dashboards: A well-crafted IT monitoring dashboard can be a thing of beauty, as well as a powerful tool for your analysts, who will spend the majority of their days engaging with it. Spend the time necessary to refine your dashboards to give you the best possible information in the best possible way.
- Embrace redundancy: Don’t rely on a single source of data to determine the performance of a critical system or service. Having a secondary source of data can, for example, help you understand if a server has gone down or if you’ve only lost access to it.
- Keep your eyes open for outliers: The goal of IT monitoring is to ensure your systems are functioning at their best. It’s possible you could have a majority of users experiencing adequate to good performance while at the same time a minority are seeing extremely negative results. If you look only at the average or mean numbers, you can miss outliers that could signal major issues.
IT monitoring is not just about telling a technician when a server crashes. It’s also about predicting these problems in advance and, increasingly, automating a response to remedy performance issues before users are actually impacted.
As IT infrastructures have become increasingly complex, it has become essential for IT managers to implement systems that allow them to keep pace, a challenge which has become greater than ever. IT monitoring is an essential part of your business, not just to ensure system performance but to ensure the availability of critical business services.
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