Monitoring is a vital aspect of the job role of a SysAdmin. How you do the monitoring of your infrastructure determines how are the results are. Below are 10 things to consider before you select a monitoring tool for your infrastructure/client.
Alerting system:- When you have a wider variety of devices working alongside each other in an environment it is very important to have good alerting mechanisms in place which trigger alerts if something does not behave well. The alert may be informed to the owner/user through a notification, ticket, email, push notification etc. If the alerting mechanism is lousy you may be all over the place pulling your hair wondering what actually went wrong.
New Discovery:- In an IT environment legacy devices are removed/ replaced with new devices while some undergo repair and have a temp device in place of that. Many components are virtualized while some are added to test new applications and processes. With so many changes constantly taking place in the infrastructure part it is important to know what are the newly made changes in the environment. The monitoring tool must be able to figure out all the devices/ nodes present in the environment.
Push and Pull monitoring:- Depending upon the size and complexity of the infra being used. It is always better to choose a tool that does both push monitoring where you actively scan a device/node for vulnerabilities and pull monitoring where an agent will pull all the details you need to do proper monitoring.
Reporting:- The reporting functionality is a very crucial aspect of a monitoring tool. Converting the accumulated data into understandable data can help in studying and analyzing different metrics and make changes based on that. It can also be useful in determining patterns for predictive analysis and dealing with problems before they arise.
Customization:- How well can we customize a tool to suit different requirements shows the adaptability of the tool. Customers tend to stick to those tools which they can customize and use the way they want to.
Multipurpose utility tool:- Apart from being a monitoring tool some are capable of troubleshooting the problem too. The reporting functionality and many other functionalities that are present in the tool can help in servicing a wide variety of objectives.
Licensing:- The range of licenses that the tool comes with can help small to medium and large scale enterprises to choose licenses that suit their requirements. Customers may not need to spend more than they require to and the tool comes with different functionalities based on the price and license.
Customer Support:- Having a good customer support service can also go along way with customer satisfaction and user retention. 24/7 customer support services and hotline to deal with grievances and onboarding new users along with dedicated representatives for large scale enterprises can be very helpful.
Wide range of applications:- While choosing a tool. make sure that the tool is not device/application-specific. It should be able to cover the maximum devices and applications present in your infrastructure. This helps in making sure that we don't have multiple monitoring tools for the entire setup.
Price:- Last but not the least is the price/cost that you may incur when you buy a tool. Make sure that you are justifying the money that you are spending on a tool. If all the above points are present in the tool that you are buying it makes sense to spend the money.
I got the idea for this article from a discussion in the below subreddit.