Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Let’s say you’re shopping in a retail store. You have everything on your shopping list except for one item. You’ve browsed through each of the aisles (twice), and you still can’t find what you’re looking for. What do you do? You’ll most likely go to the service desk. There, an associate can direct you to the aisle and shelf of where the item is. This is exactly how the IT service desk works for internal employees throughout an organization.

As networked environments continue to become larger, more global, and more distributed, many organizations have higher benchmarks for what they expect from their IT infrastructure. Companies want systems capable of adapting to hardware changes, support machine virtualization, and run applications across disparate data centers. But to ensure these complex IT environments are healthy, companies need infrastructure monitoring tools with visibility into key performance metrics.

The answer to troubleshooting network challenges lies in effectively monitoring your environment. But saying “let’s monitor our network” presumes you know what you should be looking for, how to find it, and how to get it without affecting the system you’re monitoring. You’re also expected to know where to store the values, what thresholds indicate a problem situation, and how to let people know about a problem in a timely fashion.

There’s a time-tested saying in IT: zero sensors, zero incidents. What goes unmeasured goes unmaintained, unmanaged, and ultimately unprotected. But measurement is no simple thing. What IT teams measure depends on who needs the info and what they need to do with it, so what should be measured? In almost all circumstances, results will have to be filtered, analyzed, and summarized in some fashion.

Whether you’re supporting remote teams or working in a hybrid environment, IT asset management (ITAM) is a critical practice to the business and your service management strategy. If you’ve been following our ITAM series and are delivering services to employees, you most likely have an understanding of the ITAM essentials and questions to keep in mind when developing a strategy. Now in this blog, I’ll guide you on the journey to take your strategy to the next level.

Depending on the business, there’s a myriad of IT assets to keep track of and doing it manually can be taxing. An IT asset management system allows IT pros to monitor all the hardware and software introduced into the business and when those assets exit. When a service desk has details on each IT asset, where it resides, and its owner, IT pros can provide continuity of service and better manage service costs. IT assets can be physical, digital, software, and in the cloud.

Supporting legacy applications is problematic for several reasons. These aging systems are becoming increasingly obsolete and difficult to maintain. They use outdated software languages and unsupported hardware parts—some as much as 50 years old. As they age, they introduce cybersecurity risk and are less effective at accomplishing their intended purpose. While achieving application modernization isn’t without its challenges, the benefits are considerable.

Since 2004, October has been designated by the National Cybersecurity Alliance as National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM). Immediately, the mind wanders to supercomputers creating unbreakable algorithms against adversaries with unlimited compute power. This virtual landscape is happening today, and the arms race on both sides is something we’ll have to grapple with for the foreseeable future.

Network alerts are a crucial aspect of network performance monitoring, as they’re designed to provide IT admins with quick insight into network issues, allowing for faster troubleshooting. As such, network alerts should be a key consideration for businesses choosing their network alert software.