4 criteria to select an IT monitoring tool that will boost digital performance

The world is changing and so are monitoring tools. Back in the days when IT was more technical than strategic, IT monitoring tools consisted mostly in alert management. Today, sophisticated IT monitoring solutions play a key role in an organization’s IT governance. Today IT is indissociable from business and IT monitoring at the core of an organization’s IT governance. All the more reason to give careful consideration to IT monitoring projects. So, how can you choose the best IT monitoring solution, one that equips you for the digital challenges awaiting your organization?

IT monitoring: today’s IT governance must-have

To answer this question, let’s look at the data from a 2020 study which surveyed 600 IT professionals on IT monitoring use and projections for 2023.

Four elements were highlighted:

• The ever-increasing importance of monitoring in IT governance: 89% of respondents—a whopping majority— said that IT monitoring is a high or top priority for their organization, and that its importance will increase further in the future.
• IT managers are dissatisfied with current monitoring tools: only 59% of respondents said they were satisfied with their current monitoring tools.
• Limited ability to monitor the entire IT system, which creates blind spots:IT managers surveyed estimated that they were monitoring only 61% of their IT assets and only 27% of them were satisfied with the level of visibility they have on IT.
• An IT monitoring TCO that is often drawn up by the concurrent use of multiple monitoring tools — 14 on average per organization

(Source: State of IT monitoring 2021-2023, Centreon).

The digital era’s ideal IT monitoring tool: interoperable, intuitive, cost-efficient, and agile

The above insights provide ample clues on what the ideal IT monitoring tool should be like,  one that can support your organization’s operational strategy as it progresses in its digital transformation.

On this topic, one of our MSP clients shares his experience – the company had listened to client expectations to select a new IT monitoring tool that could respond to the highest requirements.

Read the customer story

To meet similar requirements, here’s what you should look for in an ideal IT monitoring tool:

• The capacity to interface with other ITOps tools so IT monitoring can fully play its core role in managing IT.
• An intuitive and ergonomic platform uniting a diversity of user profiles and stakeholders.
• An optimized TCO, achieved through features that accelerate and simplify deployment and with a range of capabilities that significantly reduce the need for other monitoring tools.
• Agility and flexibility, as well as the capability to easily deploy monitoring on any type of infrastructure.

Limitless interoperability: facing the digital transformation’s next steps with serenity

Innovation no longer means losing clarity and control because the tools in your stack are incompatible and won’t speak to each other. This era is well over because IT monitoring is now much about making connections to unify IT diversity. The modern monitoring platform, such as Centreon’s, is powerful enough to seamlessly collect and centralize abundant ITOps-generated data, an essential observability driver, from a rich array of environments.

Impact on the organization’s digital performance: Feeding observability platforms ITOps metrics contributes to constantly optimizing the digital experiences delivered by the organization, ultimately improving competitiveness. In other words, IT operations are now a source of business insights, through metrics and KPIs that tell a bigger story. Beyond ensuring that IT service is being delivered, it highlights ways IT service could be enhanced to better meet users’ and customers’ expectations.

Ergonomics and ease of use for an immersive IT stakeholder experience

What if creating better digital experiences started with a monitoring platform that creates a better experience for all IT stakeholders? In considering your options for your next monitoring platform, don’t overlook the solution’s ergonomics and user-friendliness. These are determining factors in ensuring optimal adoption and use within your organization. As IT KPIs now provide helpful business insights, the list of IT stakeholders becomes longer, and so the diversity of profiles who will want to access the IT monitoring platform. They should do so with the same ease their other applications provide. IT monitoring tools must therefore meet current expectations in terms of usability and UX.

Impact on the organization’s digital performance: IT monitoring ergonomics can drive a real change in culture. Not only does the IT department gain in responsiveness and proactivity, reinventing the IT culture, business teams access personalized views, consuming the right information, at the right time.

Read the customer story

Optimized TCO to accelerate ROI

In considering a monitoring tool’s total cost of ownership (TCO), look beyond the upfront costs such as shelf price tag or subscription fees, and deployment costs. Weight in other costs, such as additional development needs, i.e., for specific connectors and integrations, as well as the maintenance costs to keep it operational and current, plus the costs associated with version upgrades.

Impact on the organization’s digital performance: ITOps can reduce build and run costs, focusing investments on continuous IT monitoring improvements, which in turn can significantly improve overall IT availability.

Maximum agility in managing hybrid infrastructure

Ease of deployment and scalability are key considerations, given that IT is constantly evolving within an organization, whether in terms of technology, scope, infrastructure, or applications.

Impact on the organization’s digital performance: Superior flexibility, which the Centreon solution is reputed to offer, provides organizations with the peace of mind that comes with future readiness. IT monitoring will keep adapting as technological needs evolve, including an accelerated cloud migration.

A formula to determine the ideal IT monitoring platform.
Boundless Interoperability + Ergonomics + Optimized TCO + Maximum Agility = BETTER DIGITAL PERFORMANCE

Hoping this blog article has helped you spot both the challenges and opportunities an IT monitoring project brings, as well as see how a robust IT monitoring platform can facilitate IT governance. The key takeaway here is that IT monitoring is not just about IT operations, it can be a key digital performance driver for organizations.

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