110 Best Practices for Network Monitoring in the Face of IT Complexity
2Accept That IT Complexity is Growing Faster Than Your IT Team
3Develop a Monitoring Strategy Aligned With Business Priorities
From the perspective of customers, partners and employees, your IT infrastructure and applications are your business. Your reputation is on the line every time they access it. Few things affect user experience and perception more than the availability and performance of your applications and network.
4Implement a Real-Time View of Network, Server Performance
IT teams should proactively identify and resolve issues before they hear about them from the help desk. This should include a range of monitors, alerts and escalations so your team can isolate and resolve issues as fast as possible. Stay ahead of a wide range of issues with a unified view across applications, networks and servers.
5Use Common Tools Across IT Teams to Minimize Finger-Pointing
End-to-end integrated monitoring gives you the power to coordinate—and arrive at a single version of the truth. Your solution has to do it all: wired and wireless networks, physical and virtual servers, applications and databases. It needs to support SNMP, WMI, SSH, SQL Query and Scripting, too, so you can monitor almost any device and application.
6Avoid Alert Storms
7Ensure Bandwidth Is Optimized for Business Apps, Services
8Be Prepared to Scale Up and Out
Scalability is a must. Think of how difficult your job becomes when your solutions simply don’t have the bandwidth to grow—network monitoring or otherwise. It’s not just a management problem for your bosses. It’s vital to everyone’s day-to-day peace of mind to have a solution that can grow just as quickly and massively as your organization, whether you’ve got 25 devices and are expecting to grow to 250, 2,500 or even to 25,000.
9Beware of Monitoring Software that Licenses by Elements
Lock in device-based pricing, rather than port-based pricing, which drives up total cost of ownership. It’s better to be charged a reasonable amount for a single device than for each of the 256 ports on the device. Also, beware of vendors who under-configure during evaluation: If they don’t map all dependencies, you may spend enormous amounts of time and money as you continually remap to keep up with network evolution and expansion.
10Try Before You Buy
11Choose Software With Flexible Licensing
IT can be difficult enough without the added artificial complexity some software vendors impose with restrictive licensing models. Avoid IT management software with inflexible licensing models that force you to overbuy or pay significant upcharges at renewal time. Look for IT management software that allows flexibility in how you use your monitoring licenses across all flavors of network devices, applications and servers.