Knowing what’s happening in your data center is critical to making sure you get the performance and safety you need. There’s a balance between monitoring too much, flooding you with false alerts and data you can’t use, and monitoring too little, leaving you with blindspots.

Responding to system issues becomes easier when you get better information. Here are 5 steps to take to improve the alerts you get and help you monitor your infrastructure effectively.

1. Decide what to monitor

Before you start looking at tools to help you monitor your infrastructure, think about what you want to monitor. You should only monitor metrics that are meaningful to you—metrics that provide information which you’ll act on. Don’t just buy a monitoring tool and use its default settings. You’re likely to miss the important data.

2. Track status and alerts on a single dashboard

If you use multiple monitoring tools, your staff needs to look at multiple screens, making them more likely to miss issues. Look for a monitoring tool that presents data in a single dashboard; if you need to use multiple monitoring tools, look for a way to integrate their reports to provide a uniform, overall view of data center status. Although you should have a single dashboard, don’t combine metrics that need an immediate response with those that are informational.

3. Prioritize and customize alerts

Once you’ve decided what to monitor and chosen software or written scripts to do that, decide how you’ll prioritize alerts. Some messages indicate trends that need longer-term analysis to decide how to respond; other messages indicate an immediate problem that needs to be resolved now. Make sure your team sees the critical messages before anything else. Tailor thresholds for alerting to match your needs and processes

4. Review trends on a schedule

Keep those trends messages off the screens your team uses to check current status, but don’t forget about reviewing them. Have periodic trends assessments scheduled on your calendar. That way, trends won’t impact your daily activities but you can still react to them before they cause a problem that does require immediate attention

5. Design a robust infrastructure

While you may not be able to prevent problems from occurring, you can minimize critical alerts by designing and implementing a robust infrastructure. This means building high availability into your systems and taking advantage of automation to speed up the response to problems. While your team still needs to respond to problems, a self-healing design lessens the impact of issues, reduces the need for urgent interventions, and lets you focus on building and managing infrastructure to support the business.

How do you monitor your infrastructure and respond to problems? Prescient Solutions provides infrastructure support services to design, implement, and manage IT with 24×7 response to system issues. Contact us to learn how Prescient Solutions can keep an eye on your infrastructure and keep it running.

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