IT service competition in Seattle is intense.  In order to better compete, nearly every IT service & support firm has thrown the word ‘monitoring’ on their website without really explaining what it’s for or why you want it.

Network monitoring was once the domain of only companies who purchased expensive monitoring solutions (like us) but even basic monitoring can be done extremely easily and inexpensively by even inexperienced IT admins.  So why do some companies (like us) charge a lot more for monitoring?  It’s because there are many different levels of monitoring which all yield different sets of business benefits.

‘Status Monitoring’ is built-in to even our most basic service plans – this equates to a “yes/no” answer to questions about the health of computers/servers/networks.  These types of questions can be answered with just status monitoring:

• Is the server up?
• Is the Internet connection working?
• Is e-mail working?
• Can people get to our website?

Even the smallest IT providers now provide ‘Status Monitoring’ in their service mix because it doesn’t cost much to implement.

But Status Monitoring is of limited use for larger networks; things get more interesting when we do Performance Monitoring – this is a quantitative answer to questions about computers/servers/networks – such as,

• How much disk space do we have left?
• How much traffic is flowing over the Internet connection?
• How fast is our website?
• How much CPU usage is our Admin’s workstation consuming?
• How much virtual memory is being used on our server?

Performance Monitoring is made even more useful when the data from it is stored over time.  Our main online monitoring platform stores performance metrics for 90 days.   We have a second, dedicated reporting engine combined with a data warehouse which stores this performance data for up to two years.

We can tell, for example, when you’re going to need more storage on your server or an Internet bandwidth capacity upgrade far in advance.

You can manage a network simply by ‘reacting’ to changing conditions, but we think it’s much smarter planning out network changes far ahead of time:  It keeps your employees working at peak capacity and ensures everyone has the correct equipment needed to do their job.  Performance Monitoring provides a lot of business value because it accomplishes this goal.

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