These days an increasing number of devices are taking their places on local networks. For any company that has even a few remote offices or (for instance) a half-dozen production facilities spread over a geography or on distant continents, there’s a great deal of pressure on the infrastructure, both on each LAN, and between each site.

Increasingly, the data created locally in each edge deployment is being normalized and processed locally, too. Whereas just a few years ago, all the talk was of pushing everything to the cloud, the reality is that moving data en masse is costly, a security risk, and tends to overburden centralized facilities.

That’s especially true in the age of an increasing number of IoT and IIoT deployments – the ‘en masse’ in the previous paragraph is particularly important. As the prices of technology fall and new devices come online in just about every vertical, they are joining existing IoT devices that are starting to communicate on the same networks, as OT (operational technology) is increasingly unified with IT.

Local data treatments are becoming routine, and additionally, devices or platforms are getting deployed to act as arbiters as to which information stays on site, and which is moved either to the cloud, or to head office, or moved to facilities where it can be best handled. Managing edge-based LANs is a complex affair, therefore, made more important by the mission-critical nature of services that need oversight in place.

For overstretched systems administrators, the onus on edge computing makes life a great deal more complicated. Not only does the IT function need to manage and maintain systems at an organization’s hub (like a local data center), but also oversight is required for cloud services, and now, numerous edge deployments that are as important as any other; in short, core IT services can be hosted anywhere, and IT needs tools to be able to cope with this situation.

So rather than a rattle-bag of different systems administration tools, bespoke scripts, proprietary, and open source tools each jostling for position to give a complete oversight, the full picture is best viewed through a single pane of glass, such as that provided by Paessler’s PRTG platform. There are few solutions capable of aggregating information regarding highly complex WANs into one place and coping with those seemingly daily changes to infrastructure and business demands. PRTG Network Monitor from Paessler is one such solution.

Source: Paessler

Its massive interoperability with just about any system known to inhabit the networked world (see here for a complete list of capabilities) means that it’s the perfect solution to cope with the ever-changing and always-challenging world of IT oversight.

The platform’s highly granular approach means that administrators and network managers can govern and oversee any area of complex WANs, providing as much control as required. Paessler’s licensing model is based on ‘sensors’, which usually represent a capability, function or monitor, and sensors can be re-tasked as needed, at will.

That means, for instance, that if new systems are brought online in a remote edge network, administrators might assign multiple sensors to give a “deep dive” into the new production platform. Then, as systems bed in, those sensors can be re-allocated to keep tabs on an interconnecting router, a load balancer or a mission-critical database. The demands of the business entirely drive the choice, and every sensor, however it’s configured, reports to the same dashboard.

In areas where IIoT is really taking off, engineering and manufacturing companies will find PRTG invaluable. With the capabilities of the latest IoT technology, companies can better predict machine failure points and arrange proactive maintenance schedules, plus a whole heap of other advantages; too many to catalog here.

But because business owners are aware of this, IT is playing catch-up in trying to ensure proper control, monitoring, and oversight of new deployments. With Paessler’s advanced platform, any company can stay focused on key strategic goals, safe in the knowledge that it can ensure smooth running and management of even the most complex infrastructure, or the most remote edge deployment.

To learn more about PRTG and the depth of oversight and control that the software is capable of, download an unlimited, 30-day trial. And for organizations that want a fully-hosted oversight solution, test the cloud-based version.