These past few years, the tech industry has been witnessing an increasing need for data-driven decision-making systems. Naturally, this has led CTOs to seek a comprehensive Operations Monitoring approach; one that can provide key insights into complex systems’ long-term performance and availability. Using specialized software, CTOs can track, evaluate, and utilize key system data, not only to keep up with the trends; but, also, to make superior business decisions regarding the company’s operations.
Operations Monitoring in the Cloud reality
Operations Monitoring has been brought into focus today, more than ever, because it ensures that your IT infrastructures and applications keep running smoothly. And it does that by allowing you to collect key system performance metrics. All this critical data can help you to:
- Address problems that may come from upgrades, new application deployments, etc.
- Refine your initial configuration and tailor everything to your clients’ requirements.
If you think about it, the whole purpose of monitoring is to set thresholds that will allow you to know exactly when an issue occurs; or is likely to occur.
Nowadays, Operations Monitoring is primarily part of a cloud management strategy; and, of course, cloud security processes. Typically, it’s implemented as automated monitoring functionality — often, offered as a feature in CMPs that provides access to — and control over — cloud infrastructure, through a centralized point. That means that this information is accessible from a single dashboard; offering profound insights into all cloud-based assets, and promptly notifying you if there’s an issue in your systems.
How can Operations Monitoring help you make better decisions?
Monitoring analytics quantifies the performance of systems and resources; in this way, you can gain complete visibility and make informed decisions. Such a strategy focuses on ensuring that service-level objectives (SLOs) are being met and downtime is avoided; hence, positively affecting the user experience.
This sort of approach will not only enable your company to remain agile, but also scale up. Beyond that, it ensures that your team can become more productive. The result? Happier employees, happier customers and a better ROI for your company.
To expound a bit more on these, aforementioned facts, Operations Monitoring can help you make better decisions, by:
1. Providing visibility
While it’s a basic need for companies that are active in the Cloud, not all have a visibility strategy, when it comes to their cloud computing systems. That’s where Operations Monitoring comes in, to provide you with complete visibility into your infrastructure and environments. What does this mean? That you instantly have a detailed view — and control — of all system activity.
Automatically, this will save you from the hassle of having to address application performance issues, security threats and high costs. At the same time, it will help you increase service availability, detect, diagnose and resolve issues, before they become a problem.
2. Increasing agility
Adopting an Operations Monitoring solution can also help increase overall agility, since your team will be able to develop, test and deploy applications fast. After all, Operations Monitoring comes hand in hand with automation practices; and, these two combined, have the power to drive business growth.
But, in order to drive business growth, you need to implement a monitoring strategy that will allow you to turn what was once alert chaos, into tidy, actionable insights. At the end of the day, initiating remediation activities to address issue circumstances, will prevent problems from getting out of proportion. In addition, it will make your services scalable.
3. Minimizing downtime
Operations Monitoring is also pivotal in reducing application downtime. You already know the story; if your services aren’t available for your customers, they’ll turn to similar, competitive services that are more responsive, robust and reliable.
As you can understand, using an Operations Monitoring tool ensures that your infrastructure is properly maintained and your applications remain healthy and robust. Indeed, issues with your services can be easily managed, when you have the right tool to monitor critical processes; especially those that keep everything functioning like clockwork.
4. Improving team productivity
Well, that’s a no-brainer! With Operations Monitoring up and running, your team can detect and resolve issues in no time. This type of facilitation in their workflow comes from having visibility into the processes that keep services at peak performance; as well as a smart unified asset management approach — both of which are associated with the implementation of an effective operations monitoring strategy. Such a strategy will free them time to get involved in more creative endeavors.
Indeed, when they have everything running smoothly, the team will enjoy enhanced productivity, and they’ll be able to refocus their efforts towards innovative ideas for new features or services. Instead of having your team running around in panic, patching up leaks, you can offer them the chance to further build on the services your company offers; and help the company grow.
An automated approach in Operations Monitoring
Faced with high uptime goals and strict SLA compliance, software-driven companies are turning to new approaches, regarding application performance and availability. These include, among other things, an intense operations monitoring strategy; to keep the entire IT stack up and running properly and assure ultimate accountability.
Utilizing monitoring analytics properly can lead to data-based business decisions; and, data-based business decisions means better business decisions. Besides, data can be useful to anybody; let alone, you, a CTO — to whom the consistency and sustainability of software systems is vital.
A high-level automation solution — like a Cloud Management Platform — is what you need to start making more informed decisions. Because, such a solution brings together systems, services, and development process stages under one roof; thus, greatly simplifying Operations Monitoring for you.
When choosing a CMP, it’s essential to consider one that can offer comprehensive analytical tools, combined with a simplified interface; among other features, of course. This automated approach eliminates time unnecessarily spent on monitoring systems manually; thus. allowing your team to focus on important tasks.