Is All Monitoring the Same: A Closer Look

In today’s digital world, monitoring IT performance and availability are more important than ever. Organizations must ensure that their business-critical applications and systems are always up and running to continue to serve customers, meet operational objectives, or meet compliance standards.

Welcome to another blog in the series Uptime with Richard Luna. Today we are discussing monitoring, its types, and choosing a vendor with the right monitoring service for your organization.

What is Monitoring?

Monitoring the performance of your technology infrastructure enables you to manage risk and identify issues before they significantly impact users or operations. However, monitoring can mean different things in different contexts.

Monitoring generally refers to keeping track of some measurable aspect of a system. It may be the output of some sensor (which is how we usually think about monitoring), or it could mean a log file with information about events that have occurred in the system being monitored.

Monitoring can also refer to analyzing data from past interactions with the system under observation to anticipate future needs and plan accordingly.

As a result, when seeking out monitoring solutions for your organization, it is essential to understand what each solution offers beyond just checking if something is “on” or “off” at any given time.

The details in the video will help you evaluate potential vendors so you know what you’re getting when signing an agreement for a new monitoring solution for your organization.

Proactive Monitoring

Proactive monitoring monitors your systems to identify potential outages and bottlenecks before significantly impacting users or operations. These solutions can be used to detect and report current issues and predict what might happen in the future by analyzing historical data.

This monitoring solution monitors a broader set of business systems beyond critical ones. They will typically have thresholds and rules in place to keep track of a much more comprehensive set of metrics and detect events earlier than real-time monitoring would, even if those types of events do not affect a critical system.

Proactive monitoring solutions are suitable for keeping track of scenarios that are mission-critical or for anticipating future issues by analyzing trends from past data.

Summing up

Monitoring can be used for many different things. You might be monitoring for uptime or SLA compliance, monitoring for availability or performance, monitoring for security or risk reduction, or monitoring for compliance or regulatory auditing. Regardless of your use case, monitoring is essential to your infrastructure.

If you are a small to medium-sized business, you may not fully have the internal staff to monitor your network and systems. With a 24×7 proactive monitoring service from Protected Harbor, you don’t need to worry. We will create a customized plan that suits your company’s needs, keeping your financial situation and risk profile in mind.

Our team of experts will review your current IT setup to determine if it meets your company’s goals. If it doesn’t, we will provide a detailed list of recommendations to help you get the most out of your IT investment.

Click here to schedule your technology audit today!

High Availability and Your Data: What You Need to Know

Welcome to another blog from the video series Uptime with Richard Luna discussing High Availability and Your Data and What You Need to Know. This blog will discuss data replication, high availability, and how it can impact your organization.

What is High Availability?

High availability is a phrase used by data professionals to describe systems or services that are available and resilient in the face of failures. High availability can be a challenging practice to implement, as it often requires significant infrastructure changes.

HA provides continuous access to critical resources by ensuring services remain up and running even if part of the network, devices, or services fail. It’s an IT strategy for making computer services continue to operate without interruption in response to brief interruptions, planned maintenance, unplanned outages, and other events that might prevent them from running efficiently and effectively.

Why is High Availability Important for Data?

For data to be useful, it must be accessible. When systems go down, data can be temporarily unavailable or completely inaccessible. Even if a system only experiences a momentary outage, it can take minutes or hours for it to be brought back online.

If a system is experiencing frequent outages, it can become tough to rely on the data it provides. Depending on the type of data, continuous unavailability can be highly harmful. Data that is used to make decisions (if, when, and how much to produce, where to sell, etc.) can be significantly impacted by only a few minutes of downtime.

It can become almost impossible to rely on if a data system is experiencing frequent outages. Additionally, data systems may be required to maintain regulatory compliance. For example, some industries must keep certain records for varying amounts.

Benefits of High Availability in a Data Environment

Increased Efficiency – Employees will be more efficient when data systems are available and do not experience frequent outages. The more you deal with system and data outages, the slower your employees will work. When you implement a high availability strategy, efficiency will increase.

Improved Revenue and Profit – Increased efficiency will also significantly impact revenue and profit. If your data systems are offline for a significant amount of time, it can be difficult to forecast revenue accurately and meet sales goals.

Helpful for Compliance – When you implement a high availability strategy and data systems are available and reliable, it is easier to ensure regulatory compliance. It is difficult to prove compliance if you are missing data or documents.

Reduced Risk – An unplanned outage is one of the most common causes of significant data loss. A high availability strategy makes data more resilient and reduces your risk of experiencing data loss.

Key Takeaway

A high availability strategy can help keep your data systems running continuously, even in the face of failures, so your organization can be as productive as possible. This can significantly impact efficiency, revenue and profit, and risk reduction.

It is important to remember that when you set up your highly available systems, you want to make sure that you are using a system that can replicate your data in a way that makes it available for retrieval. The last thing you want is for your company to experience a data outage. What you want to make sure of is that your data is always available and safe.

Protected Harbor is your trusted advisor for architecting and designing a cloud-ready infrastructure for your business to ensure a smooth transition to the public cloud in case that’s your plan. We provide a range of services from server setup to high availability systems, from small businesses to enterprises.

We are passionate about our work and always strive to exceed our customers’ expectations. Get a free high-availability system demo and a free IT Audit today, contact us now.