By Jamie Lerner, President, CITTIO, Inc.

Businesses rely on computers, networks, software, and databases to compete effectively. All these systems must remain healthy for a business to operate efficiently. In today's IT environment, computing devices from multiple vendors are often used to address many requirements. Should any of these resources fail unexpectedly, the negative impact can be severe.

A conservative Gartner estimate states that the average cost of downtime for a computer network is $42,000 per hour. Gartner also estimates that companies typically experience a total of 87 hours of downtime per year. A company that experiences more than 175 hours per year could save as much as $3.6 million annually by successfully implementing monitoring technology to reduce downtime to the 87-hour average.

With the increased complexity and quantity of computing equipment and software, monitoring the health of these systems can no longer be performed manually. Specifically, monitoring software must be used continuously to perform tests that ensure all computers, network devices, and software components are working properly.

Gartner notes that when critical servers and networks crash, businesses pay dearly in terms of productivity, damaged reputation, and financial performance. According to USA Today, U.S. companies lost an estimated $100 billion from network outages in 1999 alone. For average companies, the Standish Group warns that the cost of a minute of downtime for a mission-critical application is $10,000. For large companies, the price can be millions of dollars a minute.

When failures occur, minimizing downtime is crucial to limiting business impact. If a corporate Web site "available globally 24 hours a day, 7 days a week" goes down, the company loses a valuable avenue for sales, contacts, marketing efforts, and business development. Often these loses are difficult to quantify.

System failures can sever important lines of corporate communication. Frequent failures cause corporate cultures to lose confidence in these highly effective business tools, minimizing return on investment in them.

IT organizations with the challenge of keeping systems operational 24x7 have the following requirements:

• System monitoring technology that helps keep critical systems up and running around the clock.
• Monitoring systems that are rapidly implemented and easily maintained. IT organizations have neither the time nor resources for lengthy installations or complex maintenance.
• Deep application, system, and database level monitoring that provide early indications of systems trouble as well as key real-time data and historic performance statistics.
• Tools that identify problems and are intelligent enough to solve them.
• Integration of multi-vendor solutions for monitoring, maintenance, and management into one central dashboard.
• A high-level view of the overall health of the network, coupled with the ability to drill down into specific data.
• A simple, flexible licensing model. Complex per-probe or per-module licensing models are riddled with hidden costs. Multiple components make them difficult to install, and it is also impossible to predict the total cost of ownership over the product's lifecycle.

Source: TechRepublic