‘Efficiency’ is a word that’s often used in the IT infrastructure world and it’s a known fact that technology greatly contributes to organizational efficiency and of course effective monitoring takes efficiency to the next level. Regular monitoring of IT infrastructure leads to better performance of systems, devices, equipments, applications, containers, and software and also minimum technical problems and down time, but monitoring as a process has its own challenges; that’s the reason why companies avail monitoring services offered by specialized service providers.
In this post, we are discussing some of the important challenges associated with application monitoring.
- Multiple, Complex Applications and Global users
If you have global users, then your applications are likely to become more complex as they have to support different locations and languages. A better understanding of the interconnectivity of the applications is essential.
- Technological Changes Affecting the Monitoring Process
Your monitoring process and the tools used should keep up with the technological changes, failing which may result in more errors and problems. Monitoring process should evolve over time, say when improvements are made to applications, the applications monitoring tools too have to be updated and so should the process.
- Clustered Environment
Application Monitoring becomes a challenge in case of clustered environment where systems are located at different places. In a clustered environment it becomes difficult to track failure logs, disk, memory resources etc but quick tracking of these components helps to find out the application that’s actually causing the problem and resolve the issue promptly.
- Improper Testing Process
Proper testing program should be in place to make sure that the monitoring process is moving in the determined direction. Moreover the process should involve right testing methods that ensure effective monitoring of applications. Monitoring parameters usually include usability, interface compatibility, functionality, security and most importantly performance.
- Issue With Shared Applications
It’s a known fact that sharing applications enables optimum utilization of resources. Monitoring shared applications is quite challenging compared to single applications as components such as logs, disk, memory resources etc need to be constantly tracked. The risk lies in the fact that more consumption of resources by one application would affect the performance of other applications.
- Proactive Monitoring
This is a no-brainer, proactive monitoring is required to make sure that problems are identified on time and issues are solved promptly so that the end-user doesn’t get affected. The challenging part is to set the threshold limits which can be identified by studying the performance of applications. When threshold limits are surpassed monitoring tools should generate real time alerts.
- Making the Right choice
Success of the monitoring program largely depends on choosing the right set of monitoring tools keeping the requirements in mind.
Periodically evaluate your monitoring process based on well-defined parameters. An effective monitoring program should ideally identify the problems in advance or quickly after they occur, determine the causes and importantly should ensure prompt response.
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