One of the main attributes of IT monitoring is its ability to adapt to major changes in IT systems and to provide a virtuous loop of visibility over every component in these IT systems, from cloud to edge. To achieve this, it is not only necessary to collect monitoring data, but also to integrate and/or share it with other ITOps tools. ITSM, log managers, processing and performance analysis platforms… These are all essential tools to gain full system observability and for which monitoring should be thought of as a connected platform.
Top criterion for choosing a monitoring solution: Ability to integrate with other tools
When looking for a new IT monitoring solution, the top criteria for respondents to the 2021-2023 State of IT Monitoring are its ability to integrate with other tools (52%), user-friendliness (49%) and ease of deployment (44%). Tools which can be easily implemented and integrated in order to provide a holistic view are turning out to be the most sought after and the most suitable tools to meet the needs of organizations, providing them with comprehensive monitoring including cloud, edge and IoT environments. In fact, according to the same study, only 27% of businesses consider they have an excellent view on their IT system. High visibility cannot be achieved without connected monitoring, and this blog post tells you why.
No visibility without connected monitoring
You may be familiar with Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle concept. Simon Sinek is a communication theorist, pointing out that when we speak on a subject, very often we tend to start talking about “what,” rather than starting with why and then how.
When it comes to having a holistic view over the IT system, we must start by asking ourselves why it has become necessary to have such holistic visibility (since we managed without it for so long). Businesses’ new expectations in terms of observability and business-centric KPIs imply that teams in charge of monitoring should be able to collect and share a large amount of data coming from different places: systems, business data, alerts, logs, etc., all these data have become essential to monitoring IT system performance. But this cannot be done if data is not centralized, consolidated, organized, correlated -in other words, connected!
“All operational tasks and processing jobs are monitored, some every 5 minutes, using an interface with the Open Source Job Scheduler tool, and each new application is monitored.” – Rédouane Majjad, IT production manager for the departmental council of Haut-Rhin IT department
This task implies reflecting more broadly on your observability needs in order to define which tools and practices should be implemented to manage this data and monitor the performance of IT service.
Many of our clients choose Centreon to manage their technical and business data, relying on its unparalleled data collection capabilities to feed data analysis dedicated tools which quite often are not adapted to a comprehensive, efficient collection.
“Integrating new metrics is much easier because we can correlate data from multiple sources, device-based, business workflows and applicative—Thus we benefit from a renewed vision on the systems that drive business. We can finally correlate IT with business processes.” – Olivier Hamel, Technical Solutions Activity Leader at FM Logistic Corporate SAS
Don’t connect for the sake of connecting
Getting connected is all well and good, but how do you do it? Adding another labyrinthine system to existing labyrinthine systems is no solution (especially with new issues relating to cloud monitoring and the use of IoT leading to data being generated exponentially), so it is legitimate to think twice before taking the plunge and connecting your monitoring tool with the rest of the world.
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Peter Drucker
Connecting your monitoring tool to other ITOps tools in an agile and scalable way is a crucial issue of digital businesses’ IT performance.
At Centreon, we believe in being pragmatic. Our solution makes it easy to deploy and interconnect the Centreon monitoring platform with other tools deployed in IT businesses.
Utilizing available packaged monitoring connectors
Thanks to our Plugin Packs – our catalog of ready-to-use connectors – and their auto-discovery feature, Centreon monitors every single component in modern IT infrastructure.
Over 500 types of IT equipment are currently covered: cloud, virtualization and microservices, databases and middleware, systems and storage, networks and security, IoT, ITOM services… In just a few clicks, you can monitor your IT system from cloud to edge, with minimal configuration.
“We’re transitioning towards agile and DevOps methods to break down operational silos, better align to business needs, and support the overall digital transformation. Centreon was providing the best solution to monitor all types of IT assets, including those supporting agile and DevOps initiatives. Deal breakers were the ready-to-monitor approach, with the extensive Plugin Packs library. A centralized IT monitoring solution creates convergence that goes well beyond the benefits of correlating alerts and making IT monitoring more relevant overall.” – Nirina Razafimandimby, Deputy Head of I&O’s Department of Operations and Production at the French Department of Justice
Deeper monitoring integration with “Stream Connectors”
Open Sesame! Stream Connectors make interoperability more fluid and you can directly benefit from the capacity of other solutions to gain even more visibility and performance. With these integrations, monitoring and performance analysis data can be sent to third-party solutions in a highly flexible way, configuring the integration as needed.
Learn more: here are some of the possibilities offered by connected monitoring to make your life easier.
- Monitoring AWS with Centreon
- Monitoring AWS RDS with Centreon, for a full visibility on hybrid IT
- Monitoring Microsoft Azure with Centreon
- Monitoring Azure VPN Gateway with Centreon
- Monitoring Kubernetes and Docker with Centreon
- Monitoring Microsoft Office 365 with Centreon
- Monitoring Office 365 with Centreon: making the first step towards a digital workplace easy
- Seamless collaboration: Send Centreon notifications in Microsoft Teams room
- Connecting Centreon to PagerDuty: the best way for your teams to benefit from PagerDuty
- Why blockchain technology calls for connected monitoring
- Monitor your Blockchain with Centreon
- Interfacing Centreon with Splunk: how to get the best of both worlds in real time!
- Graylog and Centreon: Your IT monitoring system’s got talent!
- Interfacing Centreon with Prometheus: How to get the most out of connected monitoring
- Everything you’ve always wanted to know about Centreon and Opsgenie but were afraid to ask
- Analyze the response time of your websites with precision with Curl and Centreon
Further resources including ebooks, guides, testimonials, technical articles are available in our resources center and you can subscribe to our Centreon YouTube channel to watch our videos, from express tips to more focused insights to handy tutorials.
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