How to execute the best Monitoring Strategy

It is now the year 2022 and if your company is still taking hours and days to troubleshoot issues, still having a more reactive than proactive approach, have no capacity awareness, and says monitoring tools are not helping than this post is simply for you. Everything around us is getting smarter, getting better, and evolving every single day. Your phone can talk to you and give you advice, some cars can self-drive and self-park, and a watch can monitor your exercise routine and health.

An advance monitoring tool such as vROPs has evolved just as well through the years to do more than your typical monitoring. If can predict your environment, provide automation, provide costing and billing, and even provide self-healing capabilities. To skip to the bottom line, I have consulted for many Fortune 500 companies in almost every sector out there including public sector and I can tell you these are some if not all the companies monitoring challenges.

The real monitoring challenges that a company face every day.

• Everyone in IT such as Engineering, IT Support, Helpdesk, and management can all benefit from a monitoring tool, yet they are all confused on where to start and they only use it when they absolutely need it (being reactive).
• A lot of companies bought monitoring tool but barely anyone is using it (shelf-ware)
• Every company I been to is constantly growing VMs every month and they don’t know to track it. Some grow up to 500 VMs a month on average, yet the number of IT employees don’t increase (overworked staff)
• Some companies are using the alerting features for ticketing and email notifications, but it gets disregarded because there are too many non-important alerts going through (mismanagement of the product)

What are the Solutions for these challenges?

Although companies provide me with their monitoring use cases when I get there. My bigger personal use cases are the uses cases I mention above. I want everyone in all IT departments to love and use vROPS to the highest degree … willingly. I teach them how to be proactive. I show them how easy it is to be fully aware of their capacity, how to identify the problems they have today, and how to fix things in minutes when things do break. And most importantly, I change their whole view and mindset when it comes to monitoring. Monitoring is 100% essential for every company out there. If done correctly, monitoring will pay for itself easily will be an understatement. Below is the blueprint for success that I have perfected through the years to achieve this.

Step 1: Fully Understand what a powerful Monitoring tool can do

A monitoring tool such as vROPS is so advance it can provide automation, compliance, cost and billing, and so much more. For a full list of what it can do, check out this link below. I update this as new features comes out so make sure to check back often after every release.

http://www.vmignite.com/2020/03/15-features-that-makes-vrops-the-best-monitoring-tool-period/

Step 2: Learn how to maximize any monitoring tool

Easier said than done. Read my post below to understand what are today’s biggest use cases you need to solve.  Then implement the examples I’ve provided to solve those uses cases.

http://www.vmignite.com/2020/08/how-to-maximize-all-monitoring-tools/

Step 3: Implement the right Alerting Strategy

Perfecting your alerting process is the key to a successful proactive environment. Yet mostly all companies get this process wrong and then blames the product. Read my post on how to implement a successful alerting strategy.

http://www.vmignite.com/2021/06/vrops-alerting-dos-and-dont/

Step 4: Show case the work to all departments once done

Those who have done engagements with me know that I love to showcase my work with all IT staffing (operations, engineers, management, directors). If you did your job right, a 30-minute demo is all it takes to get them to use vROPS for the first time willingly. Yes, I said willingly. If you show them something that wows them and is a no brainer on how it will make their lives easier, they will log in for the first time while they are on the call. I know this because I often get interrupted while I am doing the demo because they have access issues (signs of them logging in for the very first time).

Step 5: Learn and read more about Metrics and Operation Monitoring

Iwan has shared his vROPs book to a website. If you have any questions on metrics and want to learn more on monitoring in general visit the link below

https://www.vmwareopsguide.com/

For quick links on vROPS in general for architecture, management packs, ports, patches, etc. Visit the link below

http://www.vmignite.com/2020/01/vrops-answering-all-the-major-vrops-questions-best-vrops-references/