When maintaining your IT infrastructure, there are two approaches you can take: proactive or reactive monitoring.
Reactive approaches to IT evoke a sense of chaos. A server goes down, someone’s laptop stops working, or a bad actor gains access to corporate information, and people scramble to patch the issue. You might have an in-house support team focused on the job or call in an external agency. Either way, you have a problem on your hands that costs time and money. What’s more, someone probably could have prevented it from occurring in the first place.
A reactive approach only addresses issues once they become problems. Some issues may go unnoticed for hours or days. It means you are always one step behind and attempting to patch problems instead of preventing them.
Reactive approaches often prevent you from seeing the bigger picture or diagnosing the root cause. Not only are you trying to fix the problem after it has already happened, but you are also doing it without knowing why, leading to wasted effort, frustration, and further problems.
You need a proactive monitoring solution if you want to get out of this break-fix approach to IT.
What is proactive monitoring?
Proactive monitoring finds and addresses issues before they become significant problems. For example, you might have a managed solutions provider who monitors applications, devices and systems to find and fix minor issues. Rather than losing valuable time and revenue, you can resolve problems before they cause lost productivity or revenue. In other words, proactive monitoring ensures your business continues running smoothly.
When your managed services provider (MSP) flags an issue, they will likely patch the problem without you noticing that something was wrong. For you and your team, that means work days with little to no issues experienced.
Proactive monitoring also identifies trends that might cause issues, allowing you to make changes or take action before the problem worsens and causes more damage. For example, if a particular application has begun slowing down, the MSP can investigate the cause before it brings part of your organisation to a halt. If the application keeps slowing down for a specific reason, this will become apparent through proactive monitoring.
Overall, proactive monitoring is critical to keeping your business running smoothly. By being aware of potential issues and taking action to fix them, you can avoid downtime, save money, and keep your business running smoothly.
What does proactive monitoring cover?
A managed IT services provider will proactively monitor your network and systems 24/7. A few key metrics they monitor, include:
- Resource usage: Tracking resource usage ensures you get the most from any software in your business. If your business consumes more resources than your infrastructure can handle, it slows your business down.
- Application performance: Proactive monitoring tracks application performance in near-real time, alerting you to issues as they happen so you can address them before they cause problems for users.
- Infrastructure monitoring: Proactive monitoring tracks the status of IT infrastructure and provides early warnings about issues that could impact performance or availability.
- Backup and disaster recovery: A managed IT services provider will typically manage your backups and disaster recovery plan in case of a significant outage or disaster. The provider will also regularly test your backups to ensure everything functions correctly and minimise data loss.
You can avoid potential disasters and keep your business running smoothly by keeping an eye on these things. There are several different tools and techniques available for proactive monitoring. For example, website uptime monitors ensure your site is always online and alerts you if it goes down or experiences another issue.
What are the benefits of proactive monitoring?
- Improved system performance: Proactive monitoring can improve overall system performance. It identifies and resolves minor issues to prevent them from becoming more significant, meaning these small issues no longer create inefficiencies.
- Mitigate downtime: Proactive IT monitoring does not just give you a head start on problems. It can also improve your company’s disaster recovery response. It tracks changes to your systems over time and highlights potential issues, enabling your MSP to investigate before an outage. This not only helps you avoid downtime but can also help you get back up and running more quickly if an outage does occur.
- Reduce costs: Proactive monitoring can also help you save money in the long run. When properly implemented, it is a cost-effective way to improve the reliability and availability of business-critical IT systems. By catching issues early, you can avoid the need for costly repairs or replacements down the road.
soma’s proactive monitoring solutions
With technology specialists becoming harder to find and more expensive to hire, we recommend engaging with a managed IT services provider to deploy and maintain your infrastructure and ensure staff get the best experience at work.
Our fully-managed IT solutions deliver 24/7 support that scales as your business grows. We provide unlimited and all-inclusive support, maintenance and management to Australian businesses at a fixed monthly cost. As your managed service provider, soma offers a single point of contact, convenience and flexibility for your IT needs.
Visit our Managed Services and infrastructure solutions page for more information.
