Monitoring is a common pain point for IT departments.  In your organization it is likely alerting way too much causing you to ignore what it’s trying to tell your team, or it’s doing way too little leaving you in a state where issues are being missed.  Time and time again monitoring is not really ever set up the way it needs to be.  One of my biggest issues is when it comes to monitoring of virtual servers that run applications that require large amounts of resources is how to choose the right monitoring software.

Take SQL server for example, memory on a SQL server will constantly look as if it’s consuming all of the memory on a server.  But this is typically ok; it’s the nature of the beast unless there are other latencies being seen.  Also, let’s look at Exchange server, also an application that will run high on memory especially on a mailbox server.  Again this is ok unless your monitoring tool is reporting latencies indicative of performance degradation.  Monitoring is not a science, but to set it up does require a certain level of understanding and attention to ensure that the project is completed correctly.

Based upon a correct configuration I would say YES! monitoring software can be trusted, but set it up right or it will be a failure.

Self-healing Monitoring Software?

Recently at Tech Field Day 10 #TFD10 I attended a presentation by VMTurbo where they discussed with us their monitoring tool that monitors every aspect of a VMware virtual machine.  Sounds pretty standard to me, but when you learn more about the product and the fact that it can also self-heal your virtual machines you become more intrigued.  They stated that a large percentage of their customers automate “trust” some level of their recommendations made by the product during the trial even before the customer completes their purchase.    This is both a technical win and an executive win to the modern and evolving organization.

More with Less..

The modern business is working to do more with less; while I personally feel that this is not always the best approach for various reasons, but this is slowly becoming an adopted strategy.  At first glance this approach makes it sound like you are trying to work your employees to death, but if done properly this will not be the case.  Here’s why.  First and foremost.. the cloud, as we move more and more aspects of our IT organization to cloud-based implementations administrators will not have the opportunity to learn so much more.  This supports the always evolving career path of your IT professionals, while also ensuring your value to the business is strong.

Concluding Thoughts

Technology products such as that of the monitoring solution by VMTurbo can really help a business automate important technical functions including adding/removing CPU and memory, adjusting page files and more for your virtual machines.  This can free up your time for more important things such as scripting or any other product technology you can learn to help support the company you work for.