So you’re done with the deployment of your IT monitoring system. It’s been carefully designed, configured, and implemented. A bright new era of active monitoring is starting. But is it really the end of the journey? Not at all! Every day is a new adventure, as you learn from your system and seek to optimize your monitoring practices. Here are 4 ways to ensure your IT monitoring solution continues to evolve (and perform) past its implementation date.
1. Move Your Solution as Fast as Your Company Moves
Each monitoring activity provides a good view into the health of your IT system at a given point in time. But in this era of fast-paced digital transformations, IT systems are everything except static. Their shape and scope evolve in step with the lifecycle of the business (mergers, acquisitions, etc.), as well as with the frantic pace of technological, app and infrastructure changes. Your monitoring solution can very quickly lose its relevance.
No matter how well your monitoring solution works today, be proactive in thinking about the ways it should evolve to match the real life evolution of your IT system and the emerging realities of your industry. You can call this step monitoring for the future.
2. Embrace the Power of the Plugin Packs
The DevOps movement is revolutionizing IT practices, bringing a fresh new focus on monitoring. Coupled with an agile approach, DevOps allows to turn up new projects much faster, and in greater frequency. These short, iterative work cycles make for an ever-evolving IT environment. So does the growing share of cloud-based solutions which are completely changing the face of business IT infrastructure. All this puts a lot of pressure on both the efficiency and longevity of your monitoring solution.
Yet there are ways you can ensure your solution remains productive and secure. The secret is in the plugins. Check out Centreon’s Plugin Packs, which includes regular updates for longer lasting monitoring lifecycles.
3. Monitor the monitoring
With raising expectations towards IT monitoring comes the need for greater awareness on how the solution performs during day-to-day activities and the optimal conditions for peak performance. Here too, plugins are the answer. Many Centreon users have gained new insights simply by subjecting their monitoring system to a period of observation and data collection.
With our real-time data visualization and analytics tools, building dashboards that are fully customizable, at will, is easier than ever. This allows for swift, precise actions to optimize the functionality of the IT monitoring system, or to increase or reduce the amount of data points to collect for a given monitoring perimeter, which can also evolve on its own.
4. Integrate the Monitoring System to Other IT Tools or Systems
As much as they bring fresh opportunities, new IT development approaches coupled with new technologies (Cloud, IoT, etc.) do make it harder to manage the availability of IT services—due to their sheer number and complexity. In the expanding IT ecosystem, integration therefore is key. Think of ways you can integrate the monitoring solution to other tools or systems used within the full IT environment, as to improve processes globally and create efficiencies. Let’s take Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) as an example. IT Monitoring and ITSM are two areas that can benefit from further integration. As the monitoring platform is a key production element of an IT department, it allows to link the management of IT services to its production capabilities.
The Centreon monitoring solution already allows to connect to the ITSM solution ServiceNow. When an issue is identified through the monitoring system, it opens a ticket in the ITSM solution for an optimal use of human and technical resources. Incidents are dealt with and resolved much faster this way.
Learn more on the integration of Centreon in an ecosystem:
- AIOps, ITSM and IT Automation integration with Centreon IT Monitoring
- Connecting ServiceNow to your Centreon platform
- Integrating Centreon with ServiceNow Event Management
There you are. Always a step ahead. Happy monitoring.
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