The new face of IT: Why you need a nose for infrastructure monitoring

The impact of IT across business functions has never been more evident

The role of IT department heads as critical contributors will continue to grow as technology drives more areas of a business. The proliferation of technology in the lives of consumers has now added even more complexity to the increasingly complicated IT environment. In order to be successful going forward, IT departments now have to focus intently on ensuring the uninterrupted performance of mission critical applications, while simultaneously meeting increasingly demanding requests from a tech-savvy working population. This will require, above all, deeper insights and increased agility, both accomplished by a more robust understanding of the end-to-end systems.

None of this is possible without the ability to proactively mitigate network performance issues. IT departments are stuck being reactive due to the limitations of their monitoring tools. In the absence of a detailed, end-to-end view of the system topography, IT teams are forced to address glitches after they occur rather than proactively diagnose outages before they become of any consequence to end-user performance. As end user expectations continue to rise, the entire ecosystem – including existing legacy components – will need to be monitored. Adding to this pressure, the IT department is now tasked with providing the same service level to users for their working environment that they get from their leisure IT. As users become more savvy and reliant on leisure IT, it will continue to be imperative that IT is empowered to deliver a similar experience.

IT needs to enact an integrated, single-pane-of-glass approach, breaking down siloes that cause bottlenecks and erect barriers to the department’s ability to guarantee availability and performance. Monitoring tools ensure that infrastructure is working optimally, and they help IT teams identify issues in device operations, prevent outages and discover unutilized resources. These are all crucial steps for IT teams to take when resolving issues, and are often impossible to accomplish using a siloed approach. The modern IT environment requires the ability to easily monitor configured virtual servers from a centralized location, and knowing which is the least and the most used server will ensure peak performance for the end user with no interruptions. It’s no longer enough for IT to monitor applications alone; instead, it must be able to achieve holistic infrastructure performance monitoring.

Increased access to high-powered technology introduced by the mobile revolution, along with the democratization of technical skills and computer literacy, have changed the face of IT. Ultimately, monitoring improves the end user experience, and IT teams must add the software components necessary to understand how to mitigate performance issues and maximize this experience. Once IT becomes truly proactive, it will be able to meet and exceed demands created by new technologies. Only then will the IT department earn its due recognition as an exceedingly impactful business function.

Find out how HYCU’s F5 BIG-IP Management Pack is helping IT departments achieve high availability monitoring.