Service monitoring is the process of monitoring and managing critical IT services, round the clock, for better availability and performance. Critical services and systems are proactively monitored so that the pre-defined service level agreements are met. Monitoring both physical and virtual servers continuously helps the organization address potential performance bottlenecks and paves way to maximize their business output.
Why is service monitoring important for today's business?
Service monitoring is critical as they help deliver quality services to customers, building reliability and sustainability. Proactively monitoring critical services helps detect potential network issues much earlier, thereby saving a lot of time and cost. Here are a few reasons why you might need a service monitor.
End user experience: In this digital era, customers expect immediate delivery of services. Making them wait will build frustration, leading to loss of reliability. Hence, a good service monitor will alert you of potential bottlenecks, where the service related issues are fixed before it impacts the end user.
Cost reduction: Most of the organizations are service dependent, especially with e-commerce and online sales. Service outage or slow performance will cause a significant loss in revenue.
Meeting SLAs: Many organizations follow SLAs to keep business goals in place. Installing a versatile service monitoring tools helps with monitoring the performance and reports on various blind spots in the server network. This way, the network administrators can take accountability, resolve the issue and meet service level agreements (SLAs) effectively.
And a few other reasons, like better resource planning, enhanced productivity etc, which makes service monitoring a necessity for today's businesses.
Now that you know why organizations should focus on service monitoring, here are a few metrics to take note of while monitoring your services.
Key metrics to monitor while monitoring services
Availability: A robust monitoring system will check if the services running are up and running. This is one of the basics metrics to keep track of to know if the service monitored is available or not. With downtime being detected, the tool will alert the administrator and corrective actions are taken.
Response time: Response time basically is the time taken by the system to respond to a given input. An increased time taken to receive the response clearly denotes a problem with the service.
Error rate: Error rate denotes the percentage of errors occurred during a data transfer. With increased error rates, it is understood that the service is not performing as expected.
Other performance metrics like throughput, latency, resource utilization etc are taken into account in service monitoring. This way, the service performance is seamless at all time.
How can OpManager help with service monitoring?
ManageEngine OpManager is a highly integrated network monitoring solution that has unified capabilities of service monitoring. Monitoring system level services for availability and response time is essential to ensure that your server management plan is complete.
OpManager monitors availability and response-time for the following services
DNS
IMAP
SMTP
Echo
LDAP
Telnet
FTP
NNTP
Web
Finger
POP
WebLogic
HTTPS
MSSQL
MySQL
Oracle
Custom Service Monitors
OpManager's Service Monitoring functionality is customizable and you can add custom service monitors.
OpManagers service monitoring functionality also provides you detailed graphs and reports about availability of the services that you are monitoring. Also monitor your windows services with OpManager's windows service monitor and get notified if a service goes down.
Groups
The groups feature helps the network administrtors to group devices, interfaces into a group for better network management. You can create, edit and associate threshold for a group. Not just that, the groups make pushing bulk configurations easy for a large number of devices at a given instance.
Automation
This code free feature with pre-defined cascade of actions helps you automate mundane tasks without the hassle of repetitve manual work. Workflows helps resolve network faults and manage services in your network.
Notifications
With OpManager, you can configure alerts to trigger when faults are detected, where you will have the flexibility to automate corrections or notify administrators. You can set alerts while adding new service monitors to raise alerts when the added service is down and edit the existing services as well.
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