Traditionally, organizations have been overly reliant on their IT teams to maintain and monitor their essential resource environments. However, a shortage of skilled IT professionals has made the practice unsustainable. In this article, we look at the top reasons why a modern network monitoring platform is essential for organizations to monitor their networks 24/7 and free up IT staff to invest their valuable time in critical IT projects.
A series of disruptive events over the past year, such as inflation rising at a pace not seen in 40 years and soaring energy costs, are forcing enterprises and mid-market organizations to prepare for tougher times ahead. According to The 2023 State of ITOpens a new window report from Spiceworks Ziff Davis, 83% of companies are concerned about a recession in 2023. As a result, enterprises and mid-market businesses in North America and Europe are looking for ways to reduce non-essential spending, reduce hiring, delay tech purchases, and reevaluate vendors and contracts to keep a tab on spending.
Though organizations are tightening their belts, like 21% of enterprises delaying tech purchases and 28% consolidating redundant technologies, they are conscious of the importance of a robust and efficient IT infrastructure in attaining digital transformation objectives and improving the quality of services. The 2023 State of IT report found that 61% of enterprises and 53% of mid-sized businesses would increase their IT budgets in 2023, with IT and financial services leading the charge. Among the top reasons driving the rise in IT budgets are the need to upgrade outdated infrastructure, the increasing priority of IT projects, and the need to support the remote workforce.
Challenging times for understaffed IT teamsÂ
Internal IT now faces a critical conundrum. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, companies have never been more dependent on their IT estate and the teams that support it. Whether hosted on-prem or in the cloud, applications are now critical business entities. When they are disrupted, so is business continuity. Traditionally, organizations have been overly reliant on their IT teams to maintain and monitor their essential resource environments, but this has proved unsustainable as the demand for many skills has eclipsed supply. Many companies have looked to staff augmentation strategies to fill important skill gaps within their workforce, but this is not a long-term solution. If all that wasn’t enough, a coming recession will mean IT managers will be asked to do more with less.Â
The need for an automated monitoring strategy
It’s obvious that organizations will have to continue to deal with understaffed IT teams while also requiring more visibility into their IT estate to ensure that their systems and business applications work optimally. Any disruption in your IT ecosphere will most likely affect your business operations. It’s a challenge that must be overcome for your organization to achieve its business objectives. You can’t solve this using a personnel strategy. You need an automated monitoring strategy that operates independently, regardless of labor shortages or economic conditions.Â
The purpose of an automated monitoring strategy is not to replace your IT teams. It’s to empower them by providing them with complete visualization of your network that leads to a better understanding of how your IT environment is performing. You reduce your dependency on manual processes by automating device discovery, alert monitoring, problem diagnosis, and remediation. This not only improves the performance and efficiency of your network operations but also allows IT personnel to escape the drudgery of mundane manual tasks, permitting them to focus on work that returns a greater personal and organizational value. By offloading the menial, repetitive tasks that no one wants to do, you can help reduce turnover and attract talent from organizations still beholden to legacy technology practices.
Now that organizations are more likely to increase their IT budgets in 2023, the likes of CTOs, IT directors, and network administrators must seize the opportunity to onboard cost-effective and best-in-class network monitoring technologies that can help track the uptime and performance of key elements of their IT environment, optimize resource usage, and free up valuable IT staff for essential projects.
Introducing NetCrunch by AdRem Software
NetCrunch is a smart, agentless IT monitoring system that was ranked as a top pick by PC MagazineOpens a new window for best network monitoring software in 2022. It’s an on-prem running software solution designed for today’s complex hybrid networks. Once implemented, NetCrunch can provide a holistic view of your network that helps IT administrators see and understand what is happening in real-time across your complete IT estate. Â
NetCrunch tracks just about everything, including servers, switches, network appliances, and outsourced or cloud service applications. Everything includes insightful metrics and alerts concerning status things such as your vSphere vCenter Server, VPN server, Microsoft 365 environment, backup systems and file shares, just to name a few. It will even keep you abreast of things such as pending reboots and SSL certificate expirations.Â
Figure 1: Layer 2 maps with real-time performance details for each connection are automatically created and refreshed in NetCrunch.
NetCrunch lets you learn everything about your network without flooding your teams with endless alerts, thanks to its alert escalation and automated remote remediation capabilities. With the ability to monitor up to one million performance metrics, NetCrunch delivers more knowledge about your network than you ever thought possible while reducing tedious workloads for your IT staff.Â
NetCrunch works automatically from the time of its initial deployment, scanning your network for devices that include everything from servers and firewalls to printers and cameras. The software recognizes 1,350 predefined device types automatically, and you can manually add new ones if necessary. Because new devices are constantly being deployed in networks today, NetCrunch continues its scanning process 24/7 to deliver a live view of your network whenever your IT team needs it.
The standout feature of NetCrunch is that it can agentlessly monitor both on-premise infrastructure, servers, systems, and applications as well as outsourced or cloud services and applications within the same software. As a result, you get a complete picture of the network performance and status from a single pane of glass, with live views (both automated and custom-made ones), dashboards and maps that work for various IT team members and their supervisors.Â
Five ways NetCrunch can help keep IT networks resilient to threats and disruptions
- Optimizing network performance:Â It’s a 24/7 world which is why an automated monitoring solution is imperative today. Besides round-the-clock monitoring, NetCrunch detects abnormal activity before it can have a disruptive impact on your business operations. It can help ensure that your technology supports your business goals and that your systems are operating as intended by creating a holistic view of the network.Â
Figure 2: An example of live, automatically-refreshed view with custom background images and various data widgets that display tooltips when you hover over them.
An optimized network means more than just uptime. NetCrunch smart monitoring systems can highlight potential problem areas that can be improved and pinpoint underutilized areas to optimize resource usage. You can use its reports to validate IT spending and justify purchase recommendations in your IT budget.
- Best-in-class network visualization: You can’t manage or secure what you can’t see. NetCrunch conveys the operational status of your enterprise environment through various dashboards so that you can visualize any process, service, or business flow to track its live performance. Its visualization capabilities include mapping out physical segments and routing in your network. You can generate automatic network maps to show device and service dependencies. You can quickly create and compare visual charts to get a read on known and unknown performance trends within your network. Whether using multiple 50-inch monitors or a single 13-inch laptop screen, IT admins can visualize any process, service or business flow and track its performance live.Â
- Alert management: NetCrunch monitoring software helps IT administrators tailor alerts to their team’s organization structure, schedule, and responsibility areas. You can fine-tune the volume escalation of your alerts to accommodate response times and policy requirements. Send different notifications based on node location and limit executed actions to defined severities. NetCrunch can track SNMP, and OS metrics from the most popular systems, monitor virtualization implementations, hosted applications, logs, traffic flows, device config changes, cloud service metrics for multiple cloud vendors and more. NetCrunch puts you in complete control of your alerts.
- Automated monitoring of hybrid networks: Today’s enterprise is a complex architecture of data centers, edge computing locations and multiple clouds. NetCrunch was designed for all of them. You can monitor resources at remote locations, diagnose issues and deploy fixes when needed. It’s the complete solution to facilitate faster root-cause identification of problems regardless of platform or location so you can avoid costly business disruptions.
- Simple and Fast Implementation: One of the beauties of NetCrunch is its simplicity, which starts with its deployment. The software installs on a single virtual or physical server running Windows Server 2016 or later with four cores and 4 GB of RAM. Nothing needs to be installed on your monitored devices, and it comes with over 600 predefined monitoring packs that can be applied to the most popular devices, systems, and applications. It’s so simple that you can have NetCrunch up and running for 500-node environments in under 45 minutes.Â
NetCrunch also comes with its own web server and an embedded SQL database for storing monitoring events data so there’s no need for additional software to install and licenses to provide/pay for. It further lowers NetCrunch’s total cost of ownership.
NetCrunch provides certainty in uncertain times
While 50% of organizationsOpens a new window plan to take precautionary measures to prepare for a foreseeable economic slowdown in 2023, only 6% plan to cut back on IT spending. According to the 2023 State of IT Report, IT budgets could grow by 13% year-over-year in 2023, with a median increase of 5% at the company level. Even in the most challenging of times, you can’t ignore your IT estate. A recent McKinsey ReportOpens a new window shows successful companies value innovation over cost savings. Even when cost-cutting is unavoidable, it can’t be effective without understanding what is working within your IT estate and what isn’t. That’s where NetCrunch comes in.
The innovative technology of NetCrunch can help streamline the technology processes and infrastructure that your business depends on. It can identify underutilized areas of your IT estate and provide insight into how to maximize your existing infrastructure. You may even find EOL devices that need to be brought offline and deprecated. You can also streamline your IT workforce and save their valuable time by moving manually intensive support and monitoring tasks to automated systems, allowing them to focus on value-added projects that will help companies overcome uncertain challenges.
You’ve always needed managed control of your network, but now it’s more important than ever. NetCrunch is the automated monitoring solution that can provide certainty about your network status, even when certainty is hard to find.
Is your organization using network monitoring software to optimize network performance? Comment below or let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you! MORE ON NETWORK MONITORING SOLUTIONS
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