IT Operations Monitoring: Best Practices for Real-Time Visibility

Introduction

With the digital-first paradigm of today, IT Operations Monitoring is  the backbone of every organization. Downtime of systems, application crashes, or network congestion can translate into lost revenue, lost productivity, and damage to reputation. IT Operations monitoring is therefore key to having systems available, operating correctly, and secured. Real-time visibility across the IT infrastructure enables IT teams to spot issues early and respond accordingly. In this article, we discuss the best IT Operations Monitoring too enhance operational efficiency and enable the continuous delivery of business value.

Best Practices for Real-Time Visibility

To achieve productive real-time visibility, organizations must embrace certain best practices a explained below; .

• Centralise monitoring:  Centralized monitoring consolidates data from all IT operations into a single window of visibility. Combining IT service management, cloud, network, and application monitoring offers end-to-end visibility into performance, availability, and security. For example, an organization with Microsoft Azure, AWS cloud infrastructure, and on-premises Windows servers can consolidate monitoring data onto a platform like Datadog. This eliminates the need for teams to switch between tools to view system health, identify anomalies, and address events throughout environment
•  Establish KPIs and metrics: Only when monitoring is guided by precise measurements and objectives can it be effective. For important facets of IT performance, such as the following, organizations should determine service-level indicators (SLIs) and service-level objectives (SLOs):
• Uptime: This is the amount of time a system is available to users and stays functioning. Thus, uptime, which is frequently represented as a percentage over a specified time period, is a crucial indicator of reliability. An SLO might, for instance, aim for a monthly uptime of 99.9% to provide steady availability. Uptime monitoring enables IT operations teams to promptly identify and fix issues 
• Response time: This indicator shows how quickly a system responds to user requests, including executing a transaction or loading a webpage. User satisfaction is thus significantly impacted by response time, particularly in high-traffic settings such as the cloud. During their assessments, IT Operations teams can find delays and improve system speed by analysing response time patterns.
• Error rates: This metric shows how frequently a system makes mistakes, including returning HTTP errors or unsuccessful database queries. An increase in the error rate usually indicates more serious issues, such as infrastructure or software defects. Setting acceptable error limits in SLOs aids in maintaining service quality and prioritizing fixes while continuous monitoring ensures that errors are caught early and resolved before they affect users.
• Transaction throughput: This metric, which is expressed in terms of transactions per second, indicates the number of operations a system can process in a given amount of time. It is therefore a crucial sign of system efficiency and scalability under stress. In order to plan for expansion and make sure that systems can manage high demand, IT operations use throughput indicators. Throughput monitoring also aids in determining performance boundaries and directing infrastructure upgrades throughout the organization.
• Automate responses: Automation promotes scalability, reduces the need for manual intervention, and expedites problem response. Standard operations such as resuming interrupted services, cleaning cache, cache, or applying patches can be automated through the  use of tools such as  Ansible or Puppet. Self-healing workflows should also be included to enable the organization to automate predetermined events when a predictable event occurs, or a predetermined caution threshold is encountered. As an illustration, if a VM memory usage exceeds a memory threshold, an automated script will be initiated as if it were performed by employees and either add memory or terminate non-production essential processes. 
• Conduct periodic reviews: IT operations monitoring is a dynamic process and thus should be revisited continually. IT Operations should attempt to periodically assess alert thresholds, dashboards, and coverage of monitoring alerts to ensure their operation with the technology and business needs. Periodic reviews aim to optimize IT performance monitoring, so it remains current, reduces operational noise, and allows IT teams to tackle strategic priorities rather than react to lower-priority tasks.

Real-World Use Cases of IT Operations Monitoring 

IT Operations Monitoring has a significant level of real-world application, with the above best practice process often used in collaboration. Some current real-world application use cases include; 

• Retail sector: A retail chain can use a centralized monitoring process to monitor the availability of POS systems in hundreds of stores. The managers will also use real-time alerts and ensure outages are resolved quickly to avoid lost sales opportunities. Proactiveness is also required often  using predictive analytics to reveal stores whose hardware is aging and believed to be ready to fail for example. Appropriate action to maintain the equipment before its failure can then be taken.
• Financial services: Banks typically the uptime of its online banking services for all customers, latency on transactions, and security events. Event correlation can also be included to help reveal indicators of suspicious activity, while automation can enable all or some accounts to be temporarily locked and/or also escalate an alert to a security team. Compliance with frameworks such as PCI DSS becomes far easier to manage with proactive monitoring, measurement, and alerting. 
• Healthcare: An entity such as a hospital can use IT Operations monitoring that allows coverage over an entire organization, beginning with electronic health record systems to networked medical devices and IT managing cloud-based services. Centralized dashboards can be used to provide IT staff visibility into the health of systems. Also, establishing a structure for monitoring and measurement makes compliance with legislation governing the health care sector, such as HIPAA and GDPR, easier to manage. 

Conclusion 

Monitoring of IT operations is essential in the digital economy, and the best practice regarding effective monitoring is to have real-time visibility. Organizations that choose to take monitoring seriously and utilize it as part of their operational awareness will benefit from also using real-time alerting, event correlation, and predictive analytics to find issues, so they can deal with them in advance and limit or eliminate downtime and increase service reliability.