09/17/2021 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 09/17/2021 02:30
As organizations adopt more cloud-native technologies and IT infrastructure is becoming increasingly distributed, organizations must align business objectives and end-user experience with the availability and performance of the IT infrastructure. This shift requires infrastructure monitoring to ensure all your components work together across cloud environments, operating systems, storage, servers, virtualized systems, and more.
What is infrastructure monitoring, then, and why does it matter more than ever for cloud-native architectures? Here's an introduction to infrastructure monitoring and the business value it delivers, and some best practices to keep in mind when implementing it within your organization.
Infrastructure monitoring is the process of collecting and analyzing data from IT infrastructure, systems, and processes, and using that data to improve business outcomes and drive value across the whole organization.
Simply put, infrastructure monitoring is the oxygen to your infrastructure. It collects all the data needed to provide a complete picture of availability, performance, and resource efficiency so your applications and services remain up and available to your users.
As businesses rely more heavily on applications and services for their revenue streams, system performance has become mission-critical. Millions of people around the world have recently put a massive strain on these organizations' digital properties - from unemployment claims and small business loans to telehealth and grocery shopping. The associated applications and services are mission-critical for individuals and organizations alike.
Infrastructure monitoring ensures organizations can respond to issues proactively, preventing loss of time and money. This makes infrastructure monitoring the essence of mission-critical, delivering these key capabilities:
Modern infrastructure demands modern monitoring, especially when you're negotiating the unique challenges of multicloud environments, which don't always enable the level of visibility needed into cloud infrastructure. Monitoring these environments is tricky, since each cloud vendor offers its own native monitoring tools. Juggling multiple monitoring solutions makes it hard for organizations to gain a comprehensive view of their cloud infrastructure.
Your DevOps team may also be struggling with the classic 'cattle versus pets' transition to an operational service model where computing assets become an interchangeable resource instead of something unique and irreplaceable. As organizations adopt microservices-based architecture and cloud-native technologies, they are also looking to adopt best practices for managing their new cloud infrastructure so they can provide better service and minimize unplanned downtime.
Infrastructure monitoring provides critical intelligence to help you optimize the health and utilization of these cloud-native environments, ensuring more reliable performance and a high-quality user experience.
Organizations can't afford to wait for alerts to come in when a system or application component has failed, especially if they plan to honor end-user service level agreements (SLAs). Instead, they need to adopt a proactive posture in which they identify and resolve potential infrastructure issues before they impact the user experience. Infrastructure monitoring helps organizations achieve this goal by accelerating root cause analysis, which in turn empowers cross-functional teams to effectively collaborate and fix problems before they flare into five-alarm fires.
Infrastructure monitoring also helps organizations analyze performance trends on an ongoing basis so they can better understand what peak performance looks like, optimize performance where appropriate, and flag potential issues well in advance.
DevOps teams can even leverage infrastructure monitoring as part of their A/B testing experiments. This way, teams can determine upfront how certain features or enhancements will impact application performance down the road. DevOps teams can also utilize infrastructure monitoring to validate deployments.
Your ITOps and SRE teams can also leverage infrastructure monitoring, taking advantage of the automation capabilities in modern infrastructure monitoring tools to achieve end-to-end observability across your entire infrastructure. In doing so, you can consistently deliver on customer expectations, and enable your organization to achieve its most ambitious goals as it continues to scale for growth.
Your infrastructure monitoring will only deliver high-quality insights if you have the right tools with access to the right information. With that in mind, include these types of observability data sources:
Following a few best practices will help you get the most value from your infrastructure monitoring program. For example:
With organizations focusing on modern infrastructure, traditional monitoring tools are not going to cut it. An all-in-one approach to monitoring cloud platforms and supporting applications and infrastructure is the best approach. Here are some key attributes to look for:
Now more than ever, software needs to run perfectly, and your IT infrastructure should be thought out strategically in the context of the end-user and business. Observability into performance is crucial across the IT stack and can only be achieved through a smart investment in infrastructure monitoring. This helps ensure your organization has a comprehensive look at performance and availability across your entire IT ecosystem.
Dynatrace provides a single-interface platform that delivers all-in-one infrastructure monitoring and end-to-end observability across today's modern environments - including hybrid cloud and cloud-native architectures, all with contextual insights and precise, AI-driven answers.
With a single source of truth and precise root-cause analysis, your DevOps teams can collaborate more effectively and waste less time. And with observability and automation at scale encompassing your infrastructure, your SREs can evolve ITOps into AIOps, creating valuable capacity to innovate, optimize user experiences, and transform faster.
Infrastructure monitoring should be at the core of any organization's IT strategy. That's exactly what Docebo, one of the largest providers of online learning platforms, realized when they decided to use infrastructure monitoring to gain visibility across their entire infrastructure.
You can hear the challenges Docebo faced in the cloud and how monitoring their infrastructure helps them make better business decisions in this webinar.