Reinventing Hybrid Monitoring with AI and Automation
Adoption of hybrid cloud-public cloud services with on-premises resources, is gaining prominence among SMBs and large enterprises alike. This is principally because organizations can still maintain some elements of their enterprise on-premises while running other applications, like the e-commerce front-end in the cloud.
However, this diversity has created numerous interdependencies between the elements and increased the need for monitoring every component of the hybrid cloud infrastructure. Maintaining monitoring systems for the cloud and on-premises separately might add on to the infrastructure costs and affect operational efficiency as well. A hybrid monitoring solution that is not just limited to engineering and operational efficiency, but which helps in enhancing the overall user experience across business disciplines is imperative in the current scenario.
Complexity overload
In a hybrid environment, there is an increasing level of abstraction and interconnected components because of the dynamic allocation of applications both on-premises and in the cloud. The need for service availability across the world and the usage of a multitude of monitoring tools as well as specialized resources to achieve all of these trends have added several layers of complexity to IT operations.
To answer a seemingly simple question like, "What systems and softwares are running and where?", in a modern infrastructure, IT teams have to consult a dozen tools or more to get the raw data, and then piece it down into something sensible. While these resources are constantly being changed from on-premises to the cloud and back again, debugging performance issues becomes strenuous and adds to the existing layers of IT complexity.
Of course, monitoring solutions are trying to keep pace with the rate of change of the underlying complexity. However, these tools are often domain-specific, limit data retention, or the perspective provided by each of these tools are in silos with one another, making it difficult to resolve an outage or performance issue instantly.
Ideally, a single monitoring tool should be able to handle the emerging workloads and hybrid IT, as well as breakdown huge amounts of the data-at-hand to identify the root cause of an issue, and resolve it immediately.
The must-haves for hybrid monitoring
According to Gartner, AI-derived and automated workflows are gaining leverage over traditional monitoring systems, as stated in its Top 10 Trends Impacting Infrastructure and Operations in 2019.
A monitoring tool that can pull together servers, applications, storage devices, VMs, network devices and every single component across an entire hybrid infrastructure can help IT teams look for data in a single place. Further, AI-powered insights with efficient automation capabilities can dissect the immense amount of data, identify any anomalous behavior, and kick-start rapid remediation without manual help. Consolidation brings simplicity and combats IT complexity, making infrastructure monitoring easier to manage, and further support scaling of the hybrid environment in the future. This helps organizations reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR) performance problems, focus on improving business rather than building a monitoring infrastructure, and obtain a deeper understanding of the user experience.
Monitoring for today's IT environments
The rise of more hybrid and modular IT environments are having organizations to continually reevaluate their monitoring approach to adopt agile, cost-effective, and scalable monitoring solutions. They can no longer make do with just the traditional tools for their monitoring needs.
Moving to the cloud does not mean you have to compromise on control and accountability; but rethink monitoring to suit the changing needs. With user expectations reaching a high, monitoring along with instant identification and rectification of performance issues is the need of the hour.
An AI-powered infrastructure-agnostic performance monitoring tool is the way to go for businesses to make the most out of the changing IT environment, combining the reliance of the traditional tools with the potential of the future. Site24x7 is one such monitoring tool that gives end-to-end visibility across an organization's entire hybrid infrastructure, with AI-powered insights and IT automation. Sign up and check it out with a 30-day free trial.