How to choose the best monitoring tool for your IT infrastructure

IT infrastructure operating seamlessly 24×7 with minimal interruptions, downtime, and great customer experience. These have encouraged companies worldwide to obtain remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools to early detect performance degradation and failures. However, the wide variety of options makes it a challenge for many companies to determine the suitable approach.

The first question that gets raised is, which monitoring tool shall I get for the best coverage for my IT infrastructure? Well, there is no direct answer to this question due to the combination of aspects that could influence your choice.

When selecting a monitoring tool, answering the following questions will help you list your real needs:

• What are the must-monitor components that can assure system stability and performance?
  • Knowing your IT important aspects is a power.
• What are the additional monitoring aspects that, if present, will enhance the state of visibility in my environment?
  • If you know the secondary important things they can help you in selecting among similar options.
• Does my environment require solutions suitable for enterprise-grade with HA or a lightweight solution can serve the requirements? How flexible is the tool’s structure?
  • Tools capabilities differ when handling various IT environments’ sizes, if you know the environments’ needs you can look for the tool with a suitable backend.
  • Some tools have a complex backend (e.g. server, web server, SQL, application interface, etc.) that boosts its capabilities to handle large environments.
  • Some other tools are lightweight with simple components and setup, but they may lack the power to handle enterprise-scale operations due to application limitations, letting the situation end up with spinning multiple servers with distributed configurations to be able to handle the load, loosing central management and overview.
  • As a side note, companies usually take pride in the ease and time the deployment requires. Hence, having a complex backend doesn’t always mean a complex setup. When the application is powerful, it gives ease of spinning up, migrating, moving, and rebuilding without losing data.
• The reporting requirements that are needed for your environment
  • The reporting capabilities differ between tools, list your reporting expectations and compare it with tools offerings.
• Operations-wide integrations are key for leveraging the most benefits, what are your requirements?
  •  API for automation, integration with ITSM, and other utilities can make a huge difference in the IT workflow.

After having those details, start searching for the best fit for your environment, and once you get the list of tools, the below questions will help you to choose among them:

• Can the requirements be covered by one monitoring tool (even with some workarounds), or do the requirements span different domains?
  • If you have multiple aspects to cover, such as systems, networks, applications, and databases, can they be covered with one tool or do you have very advanced requirements that lead you to look into specialized tools in each domain.
  • Usually, monitoring tools are specialized in specific aspects, with low power in the others. However, they might give just enough options to cover the requirements of your infrastructure with some workarounds and customizations, allowing you to cover the requirements with less products.
  • When that is not possible, you can suitably combine multiple tools to achieve the needed requirements
  • As a side note, some vendors offer good capabilities for multiple products (or modules) under the same product umbrella, such things can be helpful if the vendor has strong integrations between them and can leverage higher dependencies visibility between the monitored aspects from different modules.
• Can those tools handle the size of the environment? Do the tools have a good, maintainable structure?
  • As we mentioned in the first section, you shall ensure that the selected monitoring tool has a strong foundation and structure to handle the size of the infrastructure and its expected growth.
  • They shall also offer a good structure for ongoing maintenance.
  • Keep in mind that some tools may need high resource requirements for setup or some specific needs to function in the best performance, hence your IT environment needs to be equipped to supply those needs, or else they may malfunction reducing the tool’s effectiveness
• What are the requirements to start the monitoring and get the needed alerts?
  • Flexible devices’ onboarding and alerts’ configuration is a game changer.
  • If the tool can handle proper dependencies in the monitoring, it will leverage actionable alerts without alert fatigue.
  • Having the proper options to customize the alerts, appending descriptions, and making them customized to your different IT teams can make them more convenient and relatable, as some tools have a difficult-to-understand context for engineers not aware of the monitoring setup and backend.
• Which tool offers the needed reporting requirements?
  • Matching your reporting requirements is important to ensure it is giving you the visualization level you need, and sometimes, the audit requirements.
• Tools’ requirements compatibilities with the policies and components in your environment, do they conflict?
  • Each tool has its own prerequisites to enable the monitoring; requiring specific .NET versions, utilizing SNMP with specific supported versions, a specific PowerShell version to be installed, etc.
  • Some tools are agent-based, requiring specific prerequisites they can offer optimized network requirements (mostly one port to be allowed through the networks), and a stabler monitoring system as the agent is on the system itself.
  • Other tools are agentless, keeping the admins free from agent maintenance requirements, but they require more ports to be opened, and service accounts to be configured, usually with high privilege.
  • Reviewing these prerequisites and ensuring they don’t conflict with your infrastructure policies and requirements is an important point.
• Does the tool give the needed data retention capabilities?
  • Validating the retention policy for data in the monitoring tools and the ease of pulling it for reports is a point to be considered if you require having a good history reference, or If you have any audit requirements.
• If the tool requires many customizations and technical experience to get into the desired state, do I have enough capable staff who can handle its configuration?
  • Tools differ in the user experience they provide, some have high technical capabilities and flexibility leaving the option to the engineer handling the configuration to customize all the requirements. This type of tool requires highly technical expertise to handle it efficiently to leverage its benefits.
  • Other tools may offer different functionality with a very user-friendly interface that does not require deep technical skills. This is suitable if you don’t have the time or the expertise to handle customizations and baselining.
• Vendor support, is it up to the needs?
  • Powerful vendor support enhances the usability of the tool by getting the questions answered immediately, support during failures (for quick recovery), and customization needs with supported workarounds.
  • Those details make a difference in the long run, as weak support makes the tool’s maintenance challenging.
• What is the budget allocated for the monitoring tools?
  • Here is the decisive point for many organizations 🙂
  • When one tool can’t serve the needs, you can always have a mix of multiple tools each obtaining a license that is just up to the requirements to monitor the area in its power. This will help combine tools needed within the budget constraints.
  • After collecting all the details and listing the tradeoffs you can now select the best tools tailored to your environment requirements.

Tools selection is a result of analyzing your IT requirements, pain points, diversity, and constraints. Combining those answers can give a great insight into the most suitable tool(s) architecture setup. Make sure to benefit from the trial and PoC period to get insights into how the chosen tool will react to your environment.