With all of the changes and innovations happening in the technical service and support industry, it can be difficult to stay ahead of potential issues, problems, and challenges. But today’s monitoring tools can give technical service and support organizations the edge they need to respond proactively and efficiently.
We’ve all been there. Users are down and your inbox is flooded with cries for support. It’s time to take action!
But reacting to problems isn’t the solution. Downtime is a nightmare for IT—there’s got to be a better way. What if IT could be proactive?
That’s what monitoring tools are for: monitoring, trending, alerting, and managing devices and networks to ensure maximum uptime. Monitoring tools have evolved; they’re now SaaS-based, more affordable with lower upfront costs, and easier to implement and maintain. Today’s monitoring tools have several additional benefits. First, monitoring gives you foresight, allowing you to track and trend your entire network. Based on the data displayed in dashboards, you can intelligently plan services that match your company’s future needs. Second, you’re forewarned. With triggered alerts, you gain the time you need to resolve issues before end users even notice anything has gone wrong. Third, you’re forearmed. With the right monitoring tools, you can easily inventory all software and hardware to ensure compliance and currency.
Don’t get carried away, though. Too many bells and whistles can reduce efficiency and add complexity. The ideal monitoring solution should seamlessly integrate with other key support tools in a streamlined interface with a single sign-on.
Now more than ever, IT has to keep up with a rapidly changing landscape that includes consumerization, BYOD, convergence, and virtualization, along with a multitude of other challenges. This has certainly pushed the evolution of monitoring and monitoring systems, not only to keep up with these challenges but also to meet the increasing demand for business-centric perspectives from the practice of monitoring. In yesterday’s simpler world, monitoring was mostly about tracking the downtime of networks, server infrastructures, and related elements. Today’s businesses demand services that are faster to provision, lower in cost, more secure, and more reliable.
As we monitor applications, service offerings, private clouds, security, and all the other nuts and bolts that hold IT infrastructure together, we’re ultimately interested in what the consolidated results mean to the business. The real challenge is translating the flood of data generated by multiple monitoring systems into the few critical and often time-sensitive insights the business needs.
Metrics derived from monitoring can directly impact the way the business operates. Business-centric metrics create visibility across camps, and increased visibility can lead to operational, tactical, and strategic decision making. Also, metrics validate and justify what IT is doing and help it do things differently. Imagine if you could showcase the number of times issues were averted before users were affected. If you could translate this into hard dollars, then you would be able to show the business how strategically selected metrics can embody of the value of IT.