When supporting and managing IT systems, it’s essential to be proactive. The team charged with oversight of systems, however simple or complex, can’t afford to wait for the phone to ring to alert them to problems anywhere across the infrastructure. By then, it’s usually too late to correct the problem before customers, users, suppliers, or partners are affected. With knock-on effects ranging from the relatively insignificant loss of face for the IT department to enterprise-wide costly downtime, relying on crossed fingers simply isn’t acceptable.

Underpinning the situation is the unfortunate truth that when IT personnel and systems are doing their jobs well, no-one notices, and especially, no-one is going to clap the IT manager on the shoulder and wish him or her a hearty “well done!”

Taken to extremes, a genuinely excellent IT department on top of its game is a very smooth-running and calm organization. In reality, of course, when done well, highly complex systems continue to work to the business’s advantage because of a great deal of proactive work that goes on 24/7.

Proactive IT management systems

Ensuring that vital systems are monitored continuously is the first, foundational step to a truly business-centric enterprise-grade technology stack. What makes that seemingly simple requirement more challenging to achieve is that the system configurations in today’s environment are apt to change at little notice: these days, IT has to react to strategic changes of direction, rather than IT dictating to the organization what can or can’t be done.

Thanks to its unique pricing structure and its refreshingly clear use of terminology, the Site24x7 offering from Zoho lets companies redeploy business-critical sensors at will anywhere across their technology stack. That means the IT department can quietly get on with its job— maintaining uptime and responsiveness across the network— without having to put the brakes on the decisions taken by the business.

Additionally, the same methodology means a proactive approach to maintaining systems is suddenly possible. Because of the combination of the relocatable monitor and the enormous range of services and technologies that can be examined in real-time, the Site24x7 solution can be put to work to identify where systems might be struggling to cope or might even end up being points of critical failure.

IT support for routers, switches, servers, VMs, NAS, SAN and AWS & cloud: Site24x7

Performance and uptime

In today’s virtualized environments, it’s uncommon that even development systems run on single server instances or have dedicated storage. Typically, clusters of resources provide services, from sandboxed testbeds for new apps, to mission-critical, customer-facing applications. These cannot be described as only being “working” or “not working.” In an environment when the quality of user experience can determine the business’s performance, maintaining optimized bandwidth, storage, and compute is essential. There are few markets where a company has no direct competitors, and in the digital age, those competitors are just a click away for an impatient customer or customer-to-be.

Thankfully, Site24x7’s capabilities mean that every element of any system can report, in real-time, to those personnel who can reallocate resources, add capability and pinpoint nascent problems long before the business feels the impact of problems.

Furthermore, the infrastructure can be fine-tuned for optimum performance. End-users’ experience with websites, for example, can be examined in real-time with Site24x7’s “Real User Monitoring” technology, which is ideal for improving customer satisfaction metrics, for example. The technology ensures that behind the availability figures and network’s logfiles, the end-users’ experiences can have influence on IT policy. In today’s “customer first” business environment, that makes a significant difference.

Infrastructure monitoring at scale

Even the smallest startup business will, from its inception, use multiple services and technology types, every day. For larger concerns, there might be thousands of instances of service use: numerous Amazon buckets, storage arrays in-house and remote — many companies find they even run multiple flavors of, for example, SQL, as well as different versions of MariaDB, MySQL, Microsoft SQL and so on.

The insights available from the Site24x7 service mean that all that diversity can be covered off easily: it’s not platform- nor version-specific, nor does it need proprietary changes to be made to reveal its second-by-second insights. There’s out-of-the-box support, too, for multiple common platforms on Windows and Linux, from bash shell scripts, to Hadoop.

The ease of spinning up services and even app creation (thanks to low- and no-code platforms) means that the IT picture shifts constantly. The resulting complexity of IT provision used to be a management and monitoring headache only for companies whose business it was: MSPs, for example. But in today’s world, complexity and change make up the reality that every IT function faces.

From any of the 90+ monitoring points spread right across the globe, companies can now ensure that every aspect of their IT stack performs as it should and, more importantly, be able to say confidently that the technology will continue to perform well.

The best network monitoring tools for 2019

You can learn the depth and breadth of the monitor types that Site24x7 offers here, and see the transparent pricing structures on this page. From a single switch that’s misfiring to extensive clusters of VMs or containers bearing mission-critical loads, the Site24x7 solution means that IT departments remain one step ahead of problems— well before the phone rings.

Sign up for a free, no-obligation 30-day trial to see how Site24x7 from Zoho can change the way you run your IT network.