How putting IT teams back in control can help reduce downtime

As businesses grow, they will accumulate different IT devices and products – and with those, separate tools to monitor elements such as applications, servers, networks, security and compliance notifications. 

 

For those working in IT teams, this can create a fragmented picture, where it is difficult to keep track of how well individual elements are performing or identify any potential risks to IT uptime and availability. 

 

“Many small or medium-sized businesses do not know what devices they have, or have no proper inventory of what they have inside the network,” explains Sharath Babu R, Product Evangelist and ITOM thought leader at ManageEngine. “How are they classified? How are they interconnected? What are the important devices? How are they layered?”

 

Consolidating multiple monitoring tools into a single platform means administrators can proactively manage networks, servers, applications, bandwidth and security from one interface, as well as make changes on devices themselves. 

 

ManageEngine’s OpManager Plus is such a system, providing visibility across the entire IT network, including virtual machines and storage devices. “At a network device level, administrators can understand what traffic is on the network at any point in time, and what that bandwidth is being used for,” says Sharath. 

 

Such information can identify instances where employees may be accessing material that is not work-related or in breach of company policy, and could avoid the organisation having to increase its network capacity unnecessarily. Monitoring network traffic effectively can also flag up any anomalies in traffic, which can help identify signs of potential distributed denial-of-service attacks, Sharath adds. 

 

Another benefit is being able to accurately configure backup of all network devices, regardless of vendor. “Companies often have multiple tools from different vendors, and that can be a problem,” says Sharath. “The management module can help IT teams understand the configuration on the network devices and save it as a backup in the database. If there is a problem in the network, they can push that back to the devices.” Agreed configurations can also be pushed out to new devices, rather than having these come onto the network with different settings.