When choosing the right infrastructure monitoring software, it can be a minefield. With so many options to choose from, ranging from free solutions to expensive ones and targeted to comprehensive, it can be a daunting challenge to choose the one that fulfils your organisation’s requirements.
Measuring the value of an infrastructure monitoring tool and what it is worth to your organisation, and also understanding your exact needs is a good starting point to ensure you are not risking poor performance or downtime and not overspending on a tool your organisation simply doesn’t need.
To gain an in-depth understanding of the value of a monitoring tool, organisations should look at some key areas and question not can they afford it, but can they afford not to have it.
As the leader in cloud data services, NetApp empowers organisations to change their world with data. Their simple, reliable, innovative and industry-leading cloud data services, storage systems and software continuously improve how data is managed, stored, analysed, protected and migrated.
As a NetApp partner, MTI can help you build your unique data fabric, simplify hybrid multi-cloud and securely deliver the right data, services and applications for your organisation.
The value of comprehensive monitoring
Your infrastructure is a complex system of interconnected components, all of which work together and rely on each other to work effectively. Monitoring each component such as servers, storage and networks separately may seem like a logical approach, but it can cause you a problem further down the line.
Instead, you need a comprehensive monitoring software tool that provides you with real-time updates on all the problem areas and identifies how they are affecting the overall performance of your systems. Without this level of information, you could spend more time searching for problems rather than resolving them.
The value of proactive analytics and optimisation
With a comprehensive monitoring tool, such as NetApp Cloud Insights, you can use the knowledge of performance patterns to alert you to possible problems before they have the opportunity to negatively impact your users and your organisation.
Tools that use intelligent operations such as machine learning and complex pattern recognition are essential to help learn what patterns are normal and create an alert for events that fall outside those parameters.
Without this information, you would need to manually set the right threshold to trigger an alert, set it too low, and you will be swamped with alerts, but set it too high and you could miss a critical failure and risk downtime.
The value of preventing downtime
Some organisations may question why they should pay for expensive prevention tools when there are free ones on the market. The cost of downtime can be catastrophic for organisations, not only financially but also to their reputation and productivity levels.
The right infrastructure monitoring software can help you understand when your systems are performing well and when they aren’t, this peace of mind that your systems are running is invaluable to your business. The question organisations need to ask is can they afford not to have it?
Choosing the right tool
ROI analysis should be considered when comparing the different options. Organisations should consider operational efficiency savings, reduced time to find and fix problems and reduced downtime and outages.
Weigh up the expense side by considering the initial purchase and installation costs, as well as support and training costs, to help determine when you will start to see a ROI, will it be almost immediately or will it take months or even years?
Consider a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool, which can quickly figure out the interdependencies across your resources and assemble a clear picture of your environment. Gaining this type of end-to-end visibility into which resources are supporting which applications will help you proactively monitor your infrastructure.
The size of your infrastructure estate will also affect costs of monitoring tools, organisations that have more systems and components will get more value from the tool, therefore, they will have to pay more than those with smaller infrastructure estates.
This is a common model and one that makes sense, but it is worth researching how providers count the size of your environment. Some count the amount of storage while others count the number of servers or virtual machines, organisations should consider a tool that takes the complete infrastructure stack into account as a basis for what is being monitored.
Next Steps
Looking for the right storage solution for your business? It’s crucial that you carry out research, with so many solutions on the market it can be a challenge to know which is best suited to your organisation or even what it is you need.
NetApp specialises in helping organisations get the most out of their data, and brings the enterprise-grade data services you rely on into the cloud with the simple flexibility of cloud into the data center. NetApp’s industry-leading solutions work across diverse customer environments and the world’s biggest public clouds.
As a NetApp partner, MTI has dedicated services and expertise for the NetApp portfolio and can help your organisation find the right cloud storage solution.
Take our NetApp Explore assessment to learn more about the right NetApp solutions for your business so you can make an informed decision about your storage solution. During the online assessment, you will be asked six simple questions that help us gain a clearer understanding of your business needs.
We will then build a customised recommendation based on your responses to help you discover and explore NetApp’s products and solutions that are right for you. After the assessment, you will be invited to a personalised portal where you will have access to solution briefs, success stories, other useful content and can test drive NetApp products.