How to monitor your infrastructure with real-time metrics

Proactive IT environment monitoring is essential in an online world where business success is equal to system uptime.

Proactive monitoring means improved availability.

Organisations need to monitor their IT environments to ensure they are running optimally and identify any issues which could cause a failure down the line. In addition, IT environment health monitoring gives organisations the peace of mind they are providing an efficient and consistent service to their end users.

Total visibility of all interdependent systems is vital

In any IT environment problems which may cause service interruption are not immediately visible and tend to build up over a period of time.

Having total visibility of IT infrastructure services and their interdependencies is paramount in preventing issues and helps organisations make informed decisions about their IT environment.

Monitoring helps gather data and set performance benchmarks

IT infrastructure monitoring is not the only key to ensuring proactive alerting of negative incidents. Monitoring and gathering performance data over time is a key input into shaping IT strategy. As technology changes and business needs evolve monitoring IT infrastructure enables organisations to benchmark their IT systems performance and then use this information to plan for upgrades, enhancements and migrations.

Proactive analysis of IT system means organisations have a better chance of preventing major disruptions. Regular health checks on infrastructure and alerts which indicate where certain measurements are deviating from historical benchmarks can identify any discrepancies within systems and assist in proactively rectifying issues before they negatively impact business operations. The key outcome of proactive monitoring is the focus and effort of IT operations have shifted from fighting fires to preventing outages.

IT monitoring can also aid organisations in fine-tuning their infrastructure to ensure peak performance and efficiency is achieved. Close monitoring can highlight how systems interact and proactively identify any areas that are vulnerable or underperforming. By identifying bottlenecks and potential areas of danger, organisations can then use this information to enhance their services and prevent any system outages.

Monitoring is not an IT activity, it’s a business tool

Effective IT infrastructure monitoring enables data driven decision making, identifies issues early, improves the productivity and performance of IT systems, helps organisations plan for growth and ultimately helps prevent or reduce the negative effects of system downtime.

Zettagrid monitoring delivers insights

Zettagrid gives customers access to real-time monitoring of their entire environment through their status page. This service also gives customers the option to subscribe to updates which proactively alerts them should any incident occur which may have an impact on their environment.

The Zettagrid real-time status reports give customers a view of the current state of the primary Zettagrid services such as the operations centre, internet transit and DNS status. In addition, this dashboard also monitors the principal services at each of the Zettagrid locations in Australia and Jakarta.

Scheduled maintenance notices give customers prior notice to any maintenance being done on the Zettagrid platform which may affect their running services and real-time system metrics provide insight into the current bandwidth network utilisation.

Zettagrid also posts past incidents on their status page which give details into incidents which have affected the Zettagrid platform and how these were resolved, giving their customers full transparency into the environment running their critical IT services.

Real-time monitoring and historical metrics, 24/7

Customers are also able to monitor the real-time metrics of their Zettagrid services via the Zettagrid self-service portal.

Real-time and historical metrics are available at any time, so customers can monitor the performance of their virtual machines.

Blog