What’s critical for small ITOM teams is the need to be operational with the shortest time-to-monitoring (TTM) possible. The solution their business-savvy IT managers will want to choose has to be easily accessible and ready to deploy without heaping on more work or use up IT staff resources they don’t have.
Centreon advocates 4 simple rules of thumb that are embodied in its solution for IT administrators.
1- Keep it simple
This may sound clichéd but is worthy of a reminder as IT infrastructure gets more complicated. Weigh the level of internal IT competence and skill; evaluate how much development would be required, for example, to get the configuration right. If you are an IT administrator working alone and you have more than a dozen IT domains and assets to monitor, you don’t want to be writing and configuring probes for each and every one of them.
2- Single platform of truth
Implementation of the solution should be structured around the IT infrastructure and system of your company. It should not be delegated to a temp hire or intern for on-the-job learning and used as proof of their skill and initiative. It should also not be a stopgap solution to address ad-hoc needs in measuring network availability, response time of web sites, virtual machine data or performance tracking of servers.
The system requires a single point of management and user interface that can serve as a centralized console to provide a global picture, but with the ability to go into degrees of information granularity. Working on it should be transparent from administrator to administrator to convey relevant insight for IT operations and business continuity.
3- Proven integration & interoperability
Doing less with more is really what small ITOM teams can appreciate. In good monitoring, this pertains to two aspects: integration and operations. In integration, it means going with something that’s tested and proven. There’s no point in trying out the latest or most advanced and ending up with too many different tools that cause interoperable dilemmas. It will only create other overhead costs when you have to spend time understanding how each work, and later, more time to maintain and update them. Installation and integration should be within minutes to cover a sufficiently broad range of standard IT domains.
4- Performance efficiency & operational scalability
In terms of operations, it’s important to consider the volume of services to be monitored that can be pooled into a single server instance, its response time and potential bottleneck issues. Efficient operational performance is also demonstrated through hardware optimization and power consumption. Another consideration is the system’s design and how open it is to scaling up or down, both for managing changes as well as to keep cost down. It goes without saying that a modular design built on industry standard open source is typically more apt for starting small and adapting with incremental additions as needs and operations grow. It is for this reason it is largely preferred over monolithic proprietary systems.
Also read:
- 8 criteria for choosing your IT monitoring tool, or how to switch from love at first sight to a long-term relationship!
- 5 obvious reasons for Centreon IMP
- Improve your Time-To-Monitoring with Centreon Plugin Packs
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