In today’s world your business-critical applications need to be available 24×7, your staff and customers need to have access to information and functionality around the clock and your challenge is ensuring this happens, and if anything goes wrong ,you need to be able to quickly respond.
This is not easy. Today’s infrastructure can be complex. Hybrid environments span multiple clouds and on-premises compute and storage, the network connects users from any location and there is a myriad of end-user devices. It is no longer a case of just keeping the lights on; IT teams need to continually monitor, optimise and assure the end-to-end user experience.
This is why you need a robust solution in place that is not just alerting on system failure, but is proactively monitoring the performance of all of the elements and highlighting potential issues before they become business-affecting.
Ensuring You Monitor The Right Things
The first step is to ensure you are monitoring the right things. Everyone knows they need to monitor the uptime of their business-critical compute resources, but today you need to go further than that. For systems to be accessible, your network has to be performing and it is not just about availability, it is also about acceptable performance.
This is why at NAK we start by performing a thorough discovery of your infrastructure, understanding the services that your end-users and customers need and identifying the topology and dependencies on the end-to-end experience. This enables us to monitor the right things, in the right way.
Creating A Single Pane of Glass
With an IT landscape that spans multi-clouds and on-premises hardware, you need to ensure you are monitoring every component. For some this can be achieved without deploying agents, you simply connect to the real-time metrics available; for others you may require deeper insights, leveraging ‘agents’ that can run across multiple operating systems and environments is critical.
The goal is to create a single pane of glass onto your end-to-end infrastructure, simplifying the task of continually monitoring performance and end-user experience. This is an area we strongly focus on at NAK using our experience to recommend the right monitoring strategy and then leveraging the toolsets available to ensure this is effective.
Monitoring Applications & Storage
It is not just your network and compute that needs to be monitored, you need to ensure that applications are performing as required and storage arrays are continually optimised and maintained. Where a typical ‘agent’ deployment is not possible, we advise organisations to utilise SNMP v1/2/3 to enable their monitoring toolsets to communicate and pull data from these specific nodes ensuring a holistic picture is captured.
Sharing The Burden of Monitoring
With the right monitoring strategy and toolset in place, you have far more options as to how you perform and resource the activity of monitoring across your organisation. The burden can be shared with a third party such as NAK in the form of Monitoring-as-a-Service.
We engage with organisations in different ways. For some, we augment their internal IT function by being their monitoring team. We take the steps above to ensure a comprehensive toolset is in place and then meticulously monitor this within our 24×7 Network Operations Centre. This means that nothing gets missed; driven by SLAs, we take care of watching over the right things while the internal team focuses on those tasks that add value and moves their organisation forward.
For other organisations, we provide this service outside of core business hours. This allows better utilisation of internal resources avoiding unpopular shifts or on-call rotas. We work with the client to develop an incident playbook that not only enables us to keep our eye on things during the night, but to respond and in many cases fix, issues before their team returns in the morning.
In both cases our clients gain significant benefits, reducing the risk to their business, minimising disruption and most importantly, ensuring end-users receive the best possible experience around the clock.
If you are interested in finding out more about our Monitoring-as-a-Service offering, please reach out to us on 0300 456 0471, or simply drop us an email enquiries@nak.co.uk.
