5 reasons why you MUST monitor your BIG-IP’s with general monitoring solutions

Why Monitoring is Important

Of course you need monitoring and you already know that. By being astute and not taking unnecessary risks you already have some predispositioned monitoring to help you get through the day safely. The problem is that that just might not be enough.

Here are top 5 advantages of general purpose monitoring solutions, such as those based on Microsoft SCOM, over point or technology specific monitoring solutions.

1. 100% benefits only come from 100% monitoring
   For successful monitoring and to harvest all the benefits of monitoring, you need to monitor EVERYTHING! Yes, everything. Ok, you may have top notch monitoring for one part of your application delivery stack, but it’s not going to help you reach optimal time to root cause identification, if you are not able to easily correlate with events from other stack elements.
2. Continuous monitoring
   Monitoring is only good if it’s constant. It’s much easier to backup and restore single monitoring system than multiple monitoring systems. If disaster happens, proper backup will help you get up and running in no time. It can be a life saver.
3. Self-service visibility
   Even before a problem occurs, different teams need visibility into complete environment (applications, network, VMs, servers, ADC, etc.) to be able to do their jobs efficiently. With centralized and all-round monitoring, you are creating one source of truth for everybody and self-service portal for all the information users to be able to identify information they need without disrupting daily operations of F5 SMEs.
4. Easy onboarding
   More systems you have, more time you need to educate your personnel. Each part of the datacenter is not an isolated island! You want all other teams to be able to understand information from your domain without disrupting your busy schedule.
5. Integrations
   It’s much more efficient to manage all the integrations from one central system which is able to collect information from different monitored systems into context required by efficient integration than to manage integrations across multiple, disconnected monitoring solutions. Additionally, there is less training involved. Having to train people on multiple solutions can be problematic.

Without monitoring, it’s like consciously taking your most precious belonging onboard a race car, blindfolding yourself and driving mountain road – simply too dangerous. With point monitoring is like driving in reverse. Yes, it looks like you are going to reach your goal, but actually you are far from using your race car to its full capacity.

Only with general monitoring you are really successfully racing with all the challenges data centers are facing and winning the race.

Let us know what you think by commenting our blog. If you want to learn how HYCU extends Microsoft SCOM with F5 BIG-IP monitoring, ask for free fully functional, time limited evaluation.