6 Key Requirements to Help You More Proactively Monitor Your IT Infrastructure
February 10, 2016

Umair Khan
CA Technologies

It's not an overstatement to say that application performance can have a very real and significant impact on business performance. Employees expect and count on immediate access to applications to get work done — no matter what time it is, where they're located or what device they're using. And it's no secret that customers are perfectly willing to go to elsewhere if their expectations to engage through the platform of their choice and receive an optimized experience are not met.

To ensure that applications meet or exceed these high expectations, underlying IT infrastructures need to deliver continuously optimized performance. However, while delivering this optimized performance is critical, it is also growing increasingly challenging as infrastructures continue to get more dynamic, hybrid and complex.

To optimize application performance, IT teams need to proactively ensure the optimized performance of every underlying infrastructure component, including physical and virtual servers, networks, storage devices, databases, end-user services and cloud and big data environments. It is imperative that they not only identify and resolve issues quickly, but also pre-empt potential issue before there's an adverse impact on the user experience. Below are six key requirements that can help you achieve these objectives.

1. Capture and Report on Performance Metrics

Given the criticality of performance, simply reacting to alarms when infrastructure elements go down isn't sufficient. IT personnel need to be able to identify potential performance issues, and address them proactively.

2. Unify Views and Tools to Increase Visibility and Speed Issue Resolution

In many organizations, dozens of point monitoring tools have been implemented. As a result when issues arise, team members spend countless hours in triage meetings trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it, all while the user's experience suffers. IT operations teams need to adopt a single, unified view and architecture for monitoring their critical IT services, whether they're running in virtual, physical, cloud or big data environments.

3. Track User Experience

IT teams can be armed with vast amounts of performance metrics, but if they don't know what users are actually experiencing, they don't have the real performance picture. IT teams need to collect and analyze end to end infrastructure response times for real transactions, and also leverage capabilities for generating synthetic transactions that allow consistent tracking of transaction times, even during periods in which users aren't working with applications.

4. Employ Rigorous SLA Management

Once organizations have holistic monitoring in place, it is vital for IT teams to track performance and experience against service level agreements (SLAs). IT teams need to be able to track SLA compliance, immediately identify when potential issues arise and address them. Through tracking SLAs, IT organizations can measure their effectiveness in managing user experience and infrastructure performance. This measurement is also vital in accurately gauging team performance, setting goals and tracking progress.

5. Leverage Predictive and Actionable Analytics

To optimize both infrastructure performance as well as operational efficiency, IT teams should leverage predictive and actionable reporting capabilities. Actionable reports or alarms ensure your team is not spinning in circles chasing false alarms and predictive analytics provide early warnings of problems so that they can be corrected before end users are impacted.

6. Correlate IT and Non-IT Data to do Effective Capacity Planning

Addressing evolving customer expectations isn't just a matter of tracking IT data. By leveraging both IT and business data, IT teams can proactively identify bottlenecks and improve end-user experience. For example, correlating server CPU utilization metrics with even simple historical data, such as volumes of user logins or transactions, can provide meaningful insights into planning for capacity to accommodate future growth.

By addressing the above requirements, IT teams are better positioned to ensure critical business applications consistently deliver the phenomenal user experiences that will help their organizations succeed in the application economy.

Umair Khan is Product Marketing Manager for Infrastructure Management Solutions at CA Technologies.

Share this

Industry News

March 27, 2024

WaveMaker has updated its platform in response to customer demand for more sophisticated API and code management tools.

March 27, 2024

Vercara announced the launch of UltraAPI™, a product suite that protects APIs and web applications from malicious bots and fraudulent activity while ensuring regulatory compliance.

March 27, 2024

Legit Security announced the launch of its standalone enterprise secrets scanning product, which can detect, remediate, and prevent secrets exposure across the software development pipeline.

March 26, 2024

Progress announced a strategic partnership with Veeam® Software, the #1 leader by market share in Data Protection and Ransomware Recovery, to provide customers with an enterprise-ready cyber defense solution that strengthens the security of their business-critical data.

March 26, 2024

GitGuardian released its Software Composition Analysis (SCA) module.

March 26, 2024

DataStax announced a milestone in its journey to simplify enterprise retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for developers by integrating with Microsoft Semantic Kernel.

March 25, 2024

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. is collaborating with NVIDIA to enhance the security of AI cloud infrastructure. Integrating NVIDIA BlueField DPUs, which feature a broad range of purpose-built, innovative security capabilities, the new Check Point AI Cloud Protect solution will help prevent threats at both the network and host levels.

March 25, 2024

Sentry announced the release of Autofix, an AI-powered feature to debug and fix code in minutes, saving important time and resources.

March 25, 2024

Apiiro announced a product integration and partnership with Secure Code Warrior, the agile developer security training platform, to extend its ASPM technology and processes to the people layer.

March 21, 2024

Progress announced that Progress® Semaphore™, its metadata management and semantic AI platform, was named a Champion in SoftwareReviews’ 2024 Metadata Management Emotional Footprint Awards.

March 21, 2024

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®) has partnered with Udemy, an online skills marketplace and learning platform.

March 21, 2024

GitLab has acquired Oxeye, the provider of a cloud-native application security and risk management solution.

March 21, 2024

GitHub announced that code scanning autofix, powered by GitHub Copilot and CodeQL, is available in public beta for all GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) customers.

March 21, 2024

NetApp is collaborating with NVIDIA to advance retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for generative AI applications.

March 21, 2024

CalypsoAI launched the CalypsoAI Platform, an advanced SaaS-based security and enablement solution for generative AI applications within the enterprise.