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Follow UsBy 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.
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Source: TechRepublic