Why Infrastructure Monitoring is Critical to Your Business

What is Infrastructure Monitoring?

Infrastructure monitoring refers to the collection and review of information on infrastructure components to measure performance and efficiency. It gauges how healthy a system is by collecting the performance information and data from servers, databases, containers, virtual machines, and backend components. The monitoring system provides ample information for the administrators/engineers to ensure that the network runs optimally and efficiently in a proactive manner. By consistently collecting and analyzing this data, organizations can enhance company value and achieve business outcomes.

How Does Infrastructure Monitoring Work?

Infrastructure monitoring provides clear visibility of a network across all layers of a technology stack such as the application server, hardware, and operating system. Infrastructure monitoring is used by administrators to inspect and keep track of backend issues and potential complications that could arise within the network. Log files throughout the infrastructure network are captured and aggregated into a single database. These backend metrics can then be analyzed to predict and identify any performance or network problems.

The metrics that are collected to monitor infrastructure are traffic (number of requests per second), latency (time to fulfill requests), saturation (percentage of resources in use), and errors (application errors due to user requests and retrieving resources).

Monitoring consistently ensures that critical services are up and running for users. Networks are monitored with the help of hardware and software tools; these tools monitor network operations, bandwidth utilization, uptime, traffic, and more. Monitoring systems also assist in detecting all devices and users that access or “touch” the network. Many engineers install software (“agents”) on their physical servers (“hosts”) and through these “hosts” they collect data that is ultimately sent to a monitoring platform for examination. These days, monitoring platforms are commonly used to evaluate whether backend components are causing a user-facing issue. Engineers can find the source of the problem by examining various backend resource metrics such as storage use, CPU utilization, or memory utilization. Overall, using infrastructure data can greatly increase system performance and value throughout the organization.

Why Should Infrastructure Monitoring Be Implemented?

A company’s services and applications can only perform well when the fundamental backend infrastructure is healthy. To promote the highest level of performance possible for users, infrastructure monitoring should be implemented to detect, address, and prevent problems. The key benefits of monitoring include but are not limited to:

• Clear visibility of the network: By monitoring networks, administrators have access to a more comprehensive view of their network infrastructure. This means there is more visibility in the performance metrics, network traffic, and log files, which can help optimize resource utilization by identifying where most bandwidth is being used.
• Prompt insight into infrastructure: Monitoring infrastructure is important to keeping critical systems in operation. By tracking system information in real time, businesses can avoid costly network outages that frequently lead to losses of thousands of dollars and customer dissatisfaction by minimizing downtime and service degradation for users.
• Swift discernment of security threats: With a complete view on the health of infrastructure in real time, security threats are more easily discernible. Infrastructure issues can be detected early on, allowing corrective action to minimize or even prevent damage to the network.
• Efficient use of IT sources: The utilization of network monitoring systems allows engineers to have more breathing room since the software and hardware tools in infrastructure monitoring systems drastically reduce manual tasks for IT teams. Many menial tasks are automatically taken care of by the system so that the IT team may focus on important projects.

Infrastructure monitoring can detect and predict issues that may potentially arise and allow for the engineers to prevent even the most minor issues from snowballing into a system-wide outage. Since most server monitoring is live and in real time, there are less windows of opportunity for hackers to take advantage and breach the systems.

Monitoring also provides transparency into one’s backend components and applications, allowing the company to ensure that their critical services are healthy and accessible for their users. Network monitoring is most useful to engineers and operation teams because these individuals rely on monitoring tools to forecast backend requirements, troubleshoot performance problems, and optimize the use of infrastructure. Companies can implement and manage an infrastructure motoring tool themselves or outsource the function. Click HERE to read more about these options.

Learn about Alvaka’s Infrastructure Monitoring Solution, ODIN 360.