Enterprises need to provide an efficient and memorable "customer experience" for Websites and online applications that serve the public as well as partners. We're talking mostly about retail, social networking, educational, financial, human resource and health-care applications. To keep the Web experience optimal in highly competitive markets, IT managers must monitor Website, application, and data center performance and availability on a 24/7 basis. A set of best practices in running these sites becomes important, as does advice from others who have "been there and done that." Shane Pearson, vice president of product marketing at Hewlett-Packard’s software division, is one of those people. Pearson, who is responsible for managing the operations management product portfolio at HP, offers some insights about common misconceptions in this area.
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You Only Need Real or Synthetic User Monitoring
Depending on the situation, several end-user monitoring technologies are required to communicate the relevant information to the right people at the right time with critical information that contributes significantly to the overall success of the business. Using all three categories of end-user monitoring technologies—synthetic monitors, real user monitors and business transaction monitors—captures the customer experience across complex transactions and provides the information needed to accelerate problem isolation and resolution.
You Can Model Your Environment Manually
As time goes on and more services are added, maintaining a manual map becomes increasingly difficult to the point at which it is impossible to maintain reliable models due to the number of changes and intricate dependencies. By leveraging technology that automates discovery and dependency mapping, companies can lower costs while reducing mean time to resolution and increasing mean time between failures.
Monitoring Software Needs to Reside In-House
Many enterprises have opted for software as a service (SaaS) delivery for a variety of reasons, including lower total cost of ownership, faster implementation time and the ability to deliver insight without the need for end users or even administrators to become application-monitoring experts. An outsourced monitoring strategy offers the ability to validate the performance of applications outside its firewalls from multiple locations around the world.
The Configuration Management Database Is the Single Physical Repository of All Knowledge
Many organizations have found after years of effort that it is impossible to build one Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to serve all requirements. No single CMDB can do everything you need, which is why CMDB federation is critical in order to share information with other data repositories.
Infrastructure-Monitoring Software Can Operate in Its Own Silo
With enterprise monitoring software becoming increasingly tied to other strategies within the organization, IT organizations must, therefore, have the ability to monitor, diagnose and resolve critical problems across the entire application lifecycle.
Second or Sub-Second Sampling Rates Are Always Necessary
Second or sub-second monitoring will uncover events that are temporary or transitional and not necessarily good indicators of performance problems that truly impact end-user experience. To ensure that the right level of information is captured, all organizations need to have a systems-monitoring system that works with or without automated agents.
Monitoring All Available Metrics for a System or Application Is the Best Approach
Instead of monitoring every possible metric, IT administrators should look for monitoring systems with built-in expertise regarding the most important metrics to watch.
All Systems in the IT Enterprise Will Be Monitored
Discovery and dependency relationship mapping technology can help IT in monitoring the systems, applications and application components that matter. Once you understand what is critical to service delivery, you can construct measurable and enforceable service-level agreements (SLAs) between teams and partners to facilitate end-to-end service availability and performance.
Monitoring Processes or Services for an Application Is Usually Sufficient
In order to thoroughly understand application health, detailed component monitoring, diagnostics and dynamic configuration modeling are required to understand the complex interactions between the various services.
Monitoring Basic Infrastructure Is Enough
System monitoring alone, while still critical, will not provide an accurate or complete picture of true application performance. True end-user-focused monitoring is critical and is an essential piece of today's monitoring strategy.
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Enterprises need to provide an efficient and memorable "customer experience" for Websites and online applications that serve the public as well as partners. We're talking mostly about retail, social networking, educational, financial, human resource and health-care applications. To keep the Web experience optimal in highly competitive markets, IT managers must monitor Website, application, and data center performance and availability on a 24/7 basis. A set of best practices in running these sites becomes important, as does advice from others who have "been there and done that." Shane Pearson, vice president of product marketing at Hewlett-Packard’s software division, is one of those people. Pearson, who is responsible for managing the operations management product portfolio at HP, offers some insights about common misconceptions in this area.