AKIBIA'S PRACTICAL GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Take Full Advantage of System Monitoring
According to analyst research the average hourly cost of downtime ranges from $28,000 in manufacturing to $2.5 million in banking and finance to $6.5 million in the brokerage industry. With uptime and data center performance of critical importance proactive systems monitoring needs to be a de facto element in any data center strategy. Yet, still companies are risking performance levels and business efficiency by not fully leveraging monitoring to improve their data centers.
The important thing to remember is that systems monitoring should be treated like a process, not a product. The first step is to understand the impact of specific systems on business performance. How critical is each system? How would the company be impacted if the system failed? Then, set threat levels within the monitoring tool accordingly. Systems with lower priority can have higher tolerance levels and mission-critical systems should have lower levels that notify IT or your service provider on first observation of a potential issue. But this is just the first step.
To fully benefit from monitoring, you have to engage the process beyond the simple threat alert step. It’s important to analyze the data on a quarterly and annual basis to pin point underlying issues that may be impacting multiple systems. Is heating or cooling an issue? Are servers over or under utilized? By reviewing data on an on-going basis, you can identify issues that will impact systems across the data center, and implement a fix. This will significantly reduce the number of threat notifications you receive over time, freeing staff to focus on other IT issues, while also ensuring a higher performing data center.
What’s your process for systems monitoring?
