As the magnitude of your organization expands, so does the expanse of your network’s IT infrastructure monitoring. Hence, it is no longer adequate to rely on a fragmented approach, where each facet of the network is monitored by disparate tools.
A typical network infrastructure encompasses numerous facets, necessitating a unified monitoring solution to amalgamate these disparate elements and collectively oversee them for optimal efficiency.
Diverse facets of infrastructure monitoring
Unified Infrastructure Monitoring – ManageEngine OpManager Plus
1. Monitoring of Infrastructure Components
Infrastructure components can be broadly categorized into physical and virtual entities, necessitating seamless integration into your IT infrastructure. These novel components demand meticulous configuration while existing ones require continuous monitoring to ensure their health and availability. Additionally, they must be updated with the latest configurations to avert synchronization issues with new devices.
To ensure optimal system performance, various metrics of these components, such as CPU utilization, memory allocation, process monitoring, and system diagnostics, are scrutinized for comprehensive analysis. This aids in capacity planning and mitigating energy consumption.
2. Management of Security and Firewalls
Firewalls serve as the primary defense against malware, hackers, viruses, and other cyber threats. Nearly every organization employs firewalls to safeguard sensitive data, as proficient firewalls generate security compliance reports, facilitating adherence to regulatory frameworks such as PCI DSS, ISO 27001, NIST, SANS, and NERC-CIP.
Firewalls function by monitoring log activities, detecting any anomalies in activity levels, identifying and neutralizing unauthorized devices, addressing vulnerabilities in access points, and more. Furthermore, they extend their protective capabilities to remote devices via VPNs, ensuring a secure work environment beyond the confines of the office.
3. Compliance and Configuration Management
With security breaches on the rise, organizations, irrespective of their scale, grapple with securing their data and thwarting data breaches. Hence, investments in configuration and compliance management tools become imperative. These tools not only aid in maintaining compliance with leading standards such as Cisco IOS, SOX, HIPAA, and PCI DSS but also proactively alert organizations to potential compliance breaches, enabling preemptive measures.
Configuration management entails establishing and maintaining optimal system performance. An adept configuration management tool safeguards businesses by averting unplanned downtime through vigilant monitoring of network configurations.
This process involves automated configuration backups that can be promptly deployed upon detection of any misconfigurations. Additionally, it entails implementing role-based access control, restricting critical configuration changes to super administrators, automating device updates to minimize human intervention, and more, thereby enhancing comprehension of impending system alterations and enabling real-time tracking of configuration changes.
4. Analysis of Bandwidth and Traffic
Bandwidth and traffic monitoring facilitates understanding of bandwidth availability and usage patterns across the infrastructure, enabling real-time assessment of traffic flow, usage patterns, bandwidth consumption, and network congestion.
By monitoring bandwidth and traffic, organizations can ensure uninterrupted application performance, minimizing latency and jitter, thereby optimizing user experience.
Bandwidth analysis and traffic shaping are executed through the utilization of flow technologies such as NetFlow, Sflow, and jFlow. Leveraging this data, organizations can generate advanced reports, including forecast reports, to facilitate bandwidth capacity planning, thereby effectively managing existing IT environments and accommodating future growth.
5. Management of IP Addresses and Switch Ports
IP address management (IPAM) entails planning, tracking, and managing the IP address space within an organization’s infrastructure. This enables IT administrators to maintain an updated repository of assignable IP addresses, gain enhanced visibility into IP resource management, and delegate IP address assignments with greater clarity. Access to IPAM data facilitates prompt identification of potential data breaches or device misuse within the organization.
IPAM tools conduct periodic scans of routers and subnets to detect rogue IPs, enabling administrators to flag and block unauthorized access attempts. Similarly, switch port management aids in tracking port usage and managing inactive ports effectively.
6. Monitoring of Applications and Storage
In today’s digital landscape, the speed of applications is paramount. Sluggish application response times not only impact end-users but also impede business productivity and profitability.
Application monitoring plays a pivotal role in ensuring optimal performance of all business-critical applications, facilitating the generation of detailed performance reports. Various applications, including custom web applications, mobile applications, and popular technologies spanning servers, virtual machines, cloud applications, containers, application servers, databases, big data stores, middleware, messaging components, web servers, web services, and ERP suites, can be monitored.
While augmenting storage may temporarily address an organization’s storage needs, implementing a storage management system becomes imperative in the long run. A robust storage management process enables efficient management of storage resources and facilitates proactive planning to accommodate future requirements.
OpManager Plus: Unified IT Infrastructure Observability Solution
OpManager Plus seamlessly integrates all disparate facets of infrastructure management, offering a truly unified approach to IT infrastructure management.
The adoption of OpManager Plus for unified IT observability offers numerous advantages:
Eliminates the need for tool-switching
The incessant toggling between various monitoring tools poses a significant challenge for IT administrators. OpManager Plus, with its unified observability solution, alleviates this burden by providing a single, comprehensive monitoring system for all IT infrastructure monitoring requirements.
Facilitates cross-functional IT infrastructure observability through a unified console
Traditionally, executing cross-functional operations such as deploying secure configurations to restore device availability in the event of device failure or identifying and curtailing devices consuming excessive bandwidth necessitates the utilization of multiple tools. However, with OpManager Plus, a unified ITOM tool, these tasks can be seamlessly executed, as the entire network’s IT operations management is consolidated within a single UIM monitoring tool, thereby significantly reducing mean time to repair (MTTR).
Enhances visibility across all infrastructure components
OpManager Plus offers unified IT monitoring and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) by overseeing all IT infrastructure components, providing comprehensive, real-time visibility across the network infrastructure. Additionally, OpManager Plus’ UIM monitor facilitates the presentation of detailed visual representations of the data center (including 3D rack and floor views), network topology maps, and business views.
Prevents the need to purchase expensive tools to track tool licensing
The proliferation of numerous tools for infrastructure monitoring necessitates a dedicated resource/tool capable of monitoring the licensing of all monitoring tools, thereby adding to overhead expenses. OpManager Plus’ dynamic functionality offers unified infrastructure monitoring, eliminating the need for multiple tools and thereby saving organizations from capital expenses and the overhead of monitoring licenses.
Enables seamless integration with multiple tools
In addition to seamlessly managing multiple infrastructure silos within an organization, OpManager Plus, a unified infrastructure management tool, facilitates the expansion of infrastructure observability scope by integrating with various third-party tools.
Conclusion
In today’s dynamic business landscape, the need for a consolidated infrastructure surveillance apparatus cannot be overstated. Sanatech GS offers a solution that transcends conventional compartmentalized approaches by providing OpManager Plus, a unified IT observability solution. With OpManager Plus, organizations can achieve comprehensive efficiency and real-time visibility across all network components, ensuring optimal performance, security, and compliance. Embrace the future of infrastructure surveillance with Sanatech GS and elevate your organization to new heights of success.