High availability and performance of mission-critical applications is a matter of business survival, making smart IT systems monitoring critical. If applications fail – or suffer from low performance levels – revenues and customers are lost. IT operations managers and administrators need to adopt a complete IT dashboard with total visibility over the IT service delivery process, including deeply monitoring servers, applications, IT services and networks. Performance, availability and capacity management solutions that can quickly be deployed, automate processes, and adapt to changing enterprise situations – without breaking IT budgets - are essential for strategic IT departments.
IT systems monitoring has become such a staple for many IT shops that companies continue to expand their data centers and computing powers across vastly distributed systems and networks. Capacity management (especially in light of virtual environments) adds a new dimension to this challenge, as enterprises find they can no longer afford to simply “throw hardware” at problems to increase the level of available resources. Organizations need ways to more intelligently manage changes in capacity demand.
In recent years, the response offered by leading systems management vendors to these challenges has been a form of overkill, the IT equivalent to selling high-end, $1,000 Swiss Army knives for problems that a simple $10 paring knife could handle. Companies such as BMC, Computer Associates, Hewlett Packard and IBM offer information technology service management (ITSM) suites that purport to address IT monitoring, capacity planning, as well as a range of other requirements. However, these large, expensive and unwieldy frameworks have often failed to meet the growing demands of many IT groups, including easy to use fast deployment and affordability. Despite huge investments in software, consulting and training, IT often lacks the visibility and agility it requires to ensure operational excellence.
Recognizing the limitations of conventional ITSM frameworks, a better class of solution is emerging to address IT needs: The complete IT dashboard, with integrated server, application, IT service and network monitoring combined with deep performance, availability and capacity management. This approach not only combines unified IT systems monitoring and capacity management into a single package, but is also relatively easy to deploy and can be found at favorable price points. IT operations managers and administrators are discovering that they no longer have to buy into heavy ITSM frameworks or make do with cobbled together low end, freeware or point tool solutions. An integrated IT dashboard can offer a rapidly deployable, cost-effective alternative that keeps servers, applications, services and networks running at their peak. These solutions will be discussed at the end of this white paper.
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Topics: Database Monitoring, IT Infrastructure Monitoring Products: Uptime Infrastructure Monitor