IT Monitoring and the Importance of Dashboards

Importance of Monitoring and Data

As we all know, data or better yet, information extracted from data, is pure gold. However, it’s not just the information and extracted data that is extremely valuable. Applications, served by data, in many ways are equally valuable and akin to gold mines and high-end jewelry boutiques.

So, imagine, if you were a high-end jewelry boutique and you had nothing to sell? In the world of IT, every second an application is not available to a customer can translate to lost revenue and add to financial uncertainty in a highly volatile world.

To make sure your applications are available to your customers, IT managers and application owners must be able to identify exceptional situations and ideally to have information to avoid risk as far ahead as possible and well before any problem arises.

And the best way to ensure you are on top of that is to have a dashboard to help you with the task at hand. The dashboard should contain the following:

• Overview of both inbound and outbound traffic to help identify either exceptionally high or exceptionally low application traffic as this is usually a sign of problems with application availability or an indicator that an application may become unresponsive to some customers.
• Overview of end-user requests to the application to serve as a second indicator to help identify unusual load
• Application health and issues and especially risks information (i.e. certificate is about to expire) to help mitigate risks in time.
• If your application (and it should be) is under load balancer the overview of selected load balance algorithm is also important for identifying potential single points of failure before it happens (i.e. load balancer operating on single node)

Here’s an example of our free Squared Up dashboard.

In our next blog in the series we will discuss how good monitoring tools connect teams.

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