From basic office machines to the critical systems that drive business operations, IT is today a vital part of any company, present behind all areas of corporate activity. It follows that faults or problems with corporate IT systems potentially cause major losses through delays and interruptions, impacting on the credibility of the corporation.
Meanwhile, diversification of market needs, changes in regulatory requirements, and the evolution of global markets are all proceeding at an increasing rate. A competitive company's IT system performance-monitoring tools must keep pace with these changes.
Some companies use the standard tools supplied with an OS to monitor servers and applications in their IT system. Others use event logs and system logs. A weakness shared by most standard OS tools is that they only report system failures after the event. Post-reporting of failures allows for a prompt response and rectification, but unless potential faults can be predicted before they occur, preventive measures are difficult to implement. Additionally, locally monitoring systems with a variety of different tools can be cumbersome and time-consuming.
Integrated monitoring of servers and applications is essential to ensure that corporate IT systems will run smoothly. System administrators must be able to prevent problems from arising, and they must be able to promptly identify any faults that do occur and eliminate the cause. System administrators also need access to information on server resources and application performance in order to identify potential problems and ward off threats to operational stability. Finally, monitoring of system performance is necessary to flexibly adapt IT systems to the changing business environment.
A coordinated approach consisting of three phases - monitoring, analysis, and planning - is necessary to ensure operational stability of the corporate IT system. It is also important to properly understand the problems experienced by users in order to optimize the IT system.
System performance management cycle
The monitoring phase consists of monitoring and coordinating the availability of OS and database resources to ensure uninterrupted operation of the corporate IT system, as well as prompt detection and notification of system errors as they occur.
In the analysis phase, operational information collected via monitoring is used to identify the causes of faults and errors as they occur, as well as to forecast performance levels and threats to operational stability. The analysis phase also includes assessing issues experienced by users and continually modifying the IT system for efficiency.
The planning phase involves using the findings of the analysis phase to evaluate whether the IT system is providing a useful and supportive environment for users, and to identify any bottleneck locations. Any system upgrade or expansion requirements are determined, along with the cost of associated equipment.
