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ICYMI: How IT monitoring systems take on modern challenges
Don't lose track of IT monitoring as you come to grips with containers and AI advantages. These articles gear up IT and cloud admins to refine processes and improve efficiency.
The IT sector is alight with activity, between software updates and security breaches, tool releases and mergers. It can be hard to keep up -- and even harder to catch everything.
IT monitoring systems give organizations vital visibility into applications and infrastructure. But while it's easy for a machine to process large volumes of data in near-real time, it's more work for IT professionals to see and handle everything that comes their way.
In case you missed it, we've bundled insights on how to use IT monitoring systems to prevent breaks, breaches and bottlenecks. Veteran IT journalist Beth Pariseau presents one of the toughest monitoring cases: a multi-cloud containerized deployment. Industry experts Brian Kirsch and Stephen Bigelow share ways to improve monitoring alerts and incident response. Finally, IT administrators with cloud responsibilities should check out journalist George Lawton's roundup of IaaS-native monitoring systems.
Myriad clouds can live in a single interface
Healthcare tech firm AthenaHealth operates applications on several public cloud services and a containerized environment. But the more infrastructure environments in use, the harder it gets to monitor them all sufficiently -- not to mention efficiently. Beth Pariseau explores how and why this organization chose SignalFx real-time monitoring and analytics for its integrations with AWS CloudWatch and Prometheus to centralize monitoring alerts and log data.
Logs can bury admins without management
Log files are a universal truth of all IT deployments, but the volume of logs from infrastructure and applications can easily overwhelm unsuspecting IT admins.
It doesn't have to be this way. Brian Kirsch offers tips on how to handle the severity and relevance of a given alert, and explains why implementing a log aggregation tool behooves any IT organization.
Outages don't wait for poor process
Successful IT operations require an efficient support process for issues that range from trivial to red-alert critical. IT monitoring systems are vital for incident detection, but are also important for post-mortems. While most support processes follow the same general path, Stephen Bigelow has suggestions and recommendations to strengthen and streamline the workflow -- before outages test its mettle.
IaaS-native monitoring options vary
All the major public cloud services come with native monitoring tools, and while each enables application performance management, they tackle the matter differently. George Lawton illuminates the distinctions between tools from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Be sure your organization gets the monitoring it needs for cloud-native apps and cloud migrations.
