The Importance of System Health and Uptime Reporting for IT Monitoring

IT services are now directly responsible for a significant portion of the revenue some companies makes.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at Apple where their services business continues to grow and was $7BN in a recent quarter.

However it’s not always good news for IT services. Last year, problems with IT services were instant news highlights. Remember Delta? Their five-hour computer outage resulted in $150 million in lost revenue!

Making sure data center services are available, performing at the level expected by customers, and that they are secure is any IT manager’s responsibility and that’s what makes their job very hard.

Many or our customers use F5 BIG-IP to deliver their applications to their own customers. Using F5 BIG-IP helps them prevent application outages. If your data center is using F5 BIG-IP, controlling applications health and uptime practically translates to controlling health and uptime of F5 BIG-IP application representation.

An important aspect of any IT manager’s job is to provide relevant and timely reports. A must have report for any IT manager is system health and uptime.

Common elements these reports have are:

• Historical details of application health and uptime.
• Automatic creation and delivery to stakeholders
• Visualization helping to easily find applications with most issues
• Ability to generate report for single, all or group of applications

Reporting is a key design criteria for our own F5 BIG-IP Management Packs.

We designed our product so that it fully supports creating custom reports based on data collected through monitoring. Creation of reports does not require any special knowledge but the standard reports creation knowledge in SCOM.

But don’t just let me tell you about it, here’s example how we support IT Managers with our F5 BIG-IP Management Pack and system health and uptime report in SCOM.

Take a look how easy is to identify applications with problems and understand application availability.

For an IT manager, this, easy to understand, visual, report is the report which can end up every morning (or whenever they want it) right in his inbox to be reviewed and to help focus management effort where it is really needed.

With this approach, report delivery is fully automated and IT manager is guaranteed to receive the information.

In our next post in our ongoing series we will discuss how to use monitoring to deep dive into datacenter performance and easily identify key problems.

If you are looking to maximize your health and uptime reporting and provide leadership with actionable and impactful reports, check out our SCOM MP for F5 BIG-IP, you can start with a free evaluation.