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Vigilance® Monitoring
Monitoring 101 - Benefits |
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One of the primary objectives of any Network Operations Center (NOC) should
be to reduce downtime. This would include obvious actions such as
immediately responding to an IT Enterprise function that failed instead of
waiting until the failure became visible to Users. It would also include
watching for problem symptoms and reporting/correcting them before they turn in
to outages. Because a professionally run NOC has extensive monitoring tools that
provide deep visibility into the equipment, the NOC can frequently help Systems
and Network Administrators troubleshoot problems, thus significantly
reducing the mean time to repair a problem (MTTR). In some cases, the NOC
can even restore service without bothering the Systems Administrator if this
is the way the NOC - IT relationship is structured.
Monitoring will help develop knowledge about common problems that can be
leveraged to harden the IT environment overall.
Looking for an expert, professional, NOC Design Engineer to design
and build your Network Operations Center
initiative?
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Vigilance Monitoring charges less than $10 per day per server for our
top of the line service. The cost for even brief computer service
outages can easily run in the thousands of dollars. At that rate, if the
NOC prevents even one service outage a year, it has paid for itself and then
some. In fact, it is our opinion that any Monitoring Service Provider
that does not save money for it's clients, isn't providing much of a
service at all!
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A NOC should be taking care of the day to day problems and issues that come
up with your IT Enterprise gear. This will free up IT Administrators to do
the actual Engineering work that they are being paid to do. This might
include projects such as environment hardening, implementing "best
practices", upgrade and capacity planning and other much more productive and
interesting activities instead of mostly dealing with fire fighting.
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It's pretty much a no-brainer that avoiding outages in equipment that is
directly tied to revenue is a good thing. But revenue isn't only lost when a
service goes down. Customers will go elsewhere if the service is slow
or unreliable. And many times you won't even know that the Customer's bad
experience sent them to your competition! Again, at less than $10 per day
per server, you don't have to prevent much revenue loss before having a NOC
really pays for itself.
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Many Customers don't leave because of one particular bad experience.
Many go to the competition because of chronic unreliability or poor
overall performance. I know of many IT Departments that have pretty respectable
uptime numbers but have Customers who perceive their reliability to be
poor. That minor 10 minute DNS outage may seem trivial to you but it could just
be the straw that broke the Customer's back.
Monitoring will allow IT Organizations to "keep score" on how well
they are doing in
delivering key services to Users and Customers, and in doing so
will gain confidence and credibility with them.
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I've managed IT Departments myself. I can tell you from first hand
experience that it's no fun being in a room full of Managers listening
to complaints about how *I* allowed such-and-such a failure to happen
and what was I going to do to ensure that nothing like that ever
happened again. I've also spent years as a Systems and Network
Administrator coming to work in the morning only to find a queue of
angry users outside my office wanting to complain about the latest
disaster that's going to consume the better part of my morning to
resolve. At the very least, a NOC should be catching the vast majrity of
these high visibility events and arranging for rapid service
restoration. Instead of having to explain why the network went down
again, your biggest problem ought to be how to inform Executive Staff
about all of the outages that didn't happen because you are such a
clever IT Manager!
But another very important quality of life issue revolves around the
dreaded "on call" pager rotation duty. No one I know likes carrying the
darned thing. This is partly because Admins get tons of false alarms at
all hours of the day and night that they have to interrupt their lives to
deal with. It also has to do with the fact that the "lucky" person
holding the pager gets alarms on every problem in the network, not just
those having to do with equipment that he/she is responsible for. With a
professional NOC in place, false alarms go to almost zero. And the only
time an Administrator will get a page or a call is when something
happens to gear that they actually administer. Imagine being able to
enjoy a day at the coast with your family and not have to worry about
whether your cell or laptop is within the wireless service area!
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With professional grade monitoring tools, the NOC can be a huge help when
doing capacity planning. The NOC will have long since baselined all of the
equipment and if resource consumption is increasing they can easily plot
when increased capacity will need to be put in place.
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Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance |
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Monitoring allows IT Organizations to check service availability in real
time, examine past service availability data and use that information to
meet the service level it has guaranteed to users of the applications.
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Bottleneck Identification |
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Copyright
© 2002-2018 Vigilance Monitoring
E-mail
MSP_2018@Easyrider.com |
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