Do I need a monitoring solution? Yes, a monitoring solution is critical for on-going support of an IT infrastructure. A few of the ways in which on-going monitoring can help include: Detection of problems soon after they begin – so you can find problems before your users do Baseline your IT infrastructure, so you can understand the normal usage of your infrastructure so as to be able to detect anomalies (baseline violations) when they happen (e.g., a sudden surge in usage, a hack attack, etc.) Analysis of the degree of loading of the different IT infrastructure components and to effectively plan for capacity upgrades.

The performance of an end-user service depends on various components – the performance of the network, the server hardware, the server’s operating system, the individual application platforms (e.g., middleware) in use, and the application. In order to monitor the user-perceived performance when accessing the service, it is imperative to monitor each and every one of the above components individually and holistically as a business service.

No, Network monitoring solutions are optimized to monitor and manage key network elements such as routers, hubs, and switches, to monitor network connectivity of the different servers, and to track usage of the different network segments. But an IT infrastructure is a combination of network, system and application elements. All of these layers are critical for efficient functioning of your infrastructure and a problem in one of these layers will have a cascading effect with a potential to bring your complete infrastructure down. So it is critical that you monitor all these key elements of your infrastructure. A recent study highlights the importance of monitoring servers and applications in today’s IT infrastructure. The study determined that while 18.2% of problems are network related, over 73% of problems were caused by application failures, operating system and server failures, etc. Since network-monitoring solutions do not have the capability to interface with and monitor systems and individual applications, end-to-end application monitoring requires specialized monitoring solutions. By having a network monitoring solution you can not only look at the health of your backbone network, but the systems and applications on top of it could be failing without your knowledge.

We do not advocate that a user should eliminate existing monitoring systems. The eG Enterprise suite can co-exist and complement almost all management systems and frameworks. eG Enterprise offers integrated network, system, and application monitoring. Hence, if required, eG Enterprise can be used as the only monitoring solution in an IT environment.

An ideal monitoring solution should be able to: Perform integrated monitoring (i.e., network, system, and application monitoring) of your IT infrastructure Provide actionable information, not raw data and thereby minimize the amount of human intervention necessary to operate it Automatically differentiate between the cause and effect of problems when they happen Proactively detect and alert operators of problems before these problems affect the user experience.

Yes, System administrators are often confronted with a flood of alarms when a single problem occurs in their environment. Identifying the exact source of a problem requires a great deal of expertise and experience. Moreover, problem identification also takes time. Correlation capabilities included in a monitoring solution can dramatically reduce the time and effort necessary for problem diagnosis. To perform correlation effectively, the monitoring solution should be able to correlate between the network, system, and application layers.

Not for the long term. A whole lot of expertise is necessary in putting together a comprehensive end-to-end monitoring solution. The main drawbacks of homegrown scripts are:

• Homegrown scripts are typically constructed in an ad-hoc manner, to address problems that have arisen in the past. Because they are put together in an ad-hoc manner, these scripts may not be complete, comprehensive, and efficient.
• The cost of producing documentation, maintenance, and periodic upgrades of homegrown scripts is often very expensive.
• However – many companies have custom applications that have custom scripts to help monitor their performance, these scripts are critical to app dev teams and must be maintained.
• eG Enterprise provides you the ability to integrate your custom scripts with the eG Enterprise agents, and to have the metrics from these scripts incorporated into the patented eG Enterprise root-cause analysis engine.