As a company’s IT systems develop and overlap in function, it becomes increasingly important that they be carefully monitored at all times.
Active network monitoring helps to ensure central servers and systems are functioning as intended, while also allowing business management staff to keep an eye on employee activity in the process. Although the importance of monitoring solutions is clear for most organizations, many business leaders and teams might not be fully aware of the benefits such toolsets represent.
Below, you will find 12 of the most important advantages that IT monitoring software offers companies, organized by business objectives. Read on to learn more:
Security and Reliability
Staying on top of security threats and malicious activity on your company’s internal network can prove to be difficult. As employees turn to telecommuting and other flexible work arrangements, potential threats multiply accordingly.
Beyond threats to IT infrastructure, data breaches and other informational leaks can occur, sometimes with rather serious consequences. IT monitoring software helps out in this area by placing a watchful eye over all mission-critical endpoints at all times.
The key advantages below apply directly to security and reliability in your organization’s existing systems:
1. Documenting and Assessing Suspicious Activity
All manner of risky behavior with remote server access and authorized user sessions can result in misuse or loss of critical data. Although solutions such as firewalls and anti-virus tool kits can stop a number of common threats to your central servers, these might not be appropriate for warding off misuse of server resources by authorized personnel working remotely.
IT monitoring tools help here by filling in the security gaps left by other solutions. Real-time access monitoring can include specific metrics such as the Power Admin Active Directory Login Monitor, which records database logins and can be configured to alert management of suspicious activity through useful suppression settings.
2. Discovering Security Risks Preemptively
Thanks to IT monitoring software being able to run constantly and assess user activity dynamically, potential security risks can be identified even before they fully manifest as such.
This preemptive approach to security keeps IT teams on top of all issues involving malicious access to central servers without requiring massive time investments from team members to maintain.
3. Tracking User Access
Each user who accesses your company’s servers can be recorded by specialized IT monitoring tools. This information comes in handy should a threat be identified as having originated within your company.
Research and Development
To effectively understand where development opportunities exist in your current IT infrastructure, it is important to have a clear view of current stressors and system limitations. Proactive network monitoring makes this—and more—possible for your development team without requiring them to focus on network minutia every day.
The following advantages closely align with research and development goals:
4. Document Usage Metrics
Through the use of specialized IT monitoring tools, your team can leverage custom reports generated from documented user activity.
Accurate reports help eliminate guesswork in determining which aspects of your company’s daily operations could use developmental improvements and what those improvements ought to affect. All manner of usage metrics can be targeted and monitored to glean clear, actionable insights worth basing future development plans on.
5. Identify Potential Improvements
As metrics are amassed by your chosen monitoring tools, potential improvements can be identified faster, leading to less time being taken to develop them in the first place.
Bottlenecks in employee workflow, management insight, and profitability can be identified at the server level through consistent monitoring, then improved in increments to achieve constant growth over time.
6. Centralize Server Reporting
Scanning log and configuration files for clues as to which direction research should proceed in can waste a lot of your team’s time—time that could otherwise be put directly into meaningful development.
Overcoming this obstacle means simplifying and streamlining IT infrastructure reporting across the board. However, it can be costly to implement separate monitoring solutions at each endpoint your current systems support, not to mention the confusion managing multiple monitoring systems can cause.
Sophisticated IT monitoring solutions help by centralizing the process significantly, as is the case with Power Admin’s Server Monitor software, which generates reports for your entire server network that can be viewed on a single pane of glass.
Speed and Efficiency
Improving operational speed and efficiency within your organization usually involves streamlining communication and cooperation. IT monitoring solutions can help in both of these areas by constantly keeping an eye on key performance metrics and user behavior.
The following benefits apply specifically to speed and efficiency improvements:
7. Detect Issues Immediately
Server monitoring software makes it possible for issues to be detected as they occur or even before they occur by keeping system services and data access activity under constant surveillance.
Monitoring such aspects of system performance as user sessions and bandwidth allocation can clue in team members on malicious activities taking place on your internal network at any given time.
8. Leverage Notifications
Preconfigured alert options help in keeping IT teams abreast of important changes in server stability and general reliability—all in real-time. Without proper notifications, teams might miss downtime and offline systems long enough for such outages to affect profitability.
A server monitoring solution can send out alerts quickly enough to give your team time to address threats and anomalies as they arise.
Profit and Budgeting
Adhering to a strict budget can be difficult, especially during unprecedented periods like pandemics, but server monitoring software can help companies achieve significant savings on multiple fronts.
Even during troubling times, the following benefits of IT monitoring software can assist you in cutting administrative spend and staying on course for company goals:
9. Freeing Up Billable Time
By monitoring application activity directly, billable time can be accurately assessed and acted upon. However, besides revealing performance bottlenecks that can be optimized, using network monitoring tools makes it possible to directly free up time that would otherwise have gone toward manually assessing server performance.
10. Optimizing Spend and Resource Allocation
Identifying service bottlenecks is much easier with the help of IT monitoring software. Such tools can provide detailed reports on resource allocation per user, allowing companies to directly spend where it is needed without leaking revenue into dead-end activities.
Compliance
Accommodating legislation and legal agreements makes fine-tuning server performance and employee activity a necessity.
The following benefits that IT monitoring tools offer will help companies handle such concerns more efficiently:
11. Accommodating Local Legislation
In carefully overseen industries such as finance and health,¹ it is extremely important for companies to safeguard private information. From health records to credit card numbers, delicate consumer data must be exposed only to authorized personnel. However, even authorized staff members should not be given free rein with such information.
Server monitoring solutions allow management personnel to track access to data wherever it is digitally stored and record said access for future reference.
12. Adhering to Service Level Agreements
As server resources are consumed, reliability and speed can begin to suffer. Maintaining a minimum degree of up-time is much easier to do with proactive network monitoring tools and techniques, as outages can be acted on before they occur. Resource misuse can be identified quickly, plus system security can be bolstered dynamically to maintain stability and availability.
Power Admin Offers Help with Server Monitoring Software
Implementing the use of IT monitoring software within your organization is a potent step worth taking to keep your company on track even during times of crisis and market uncertainty. For more information on the many benefits server monitoring software offers to companies of all sizes and niches, get in touch with us at 1-800-401-2339 here at Power Admin or reach out through our contact form here
.
