In order to better manage complex IT environments and comply with burgeoning regulations, financial services organizations must learn how to proactively manage disruptive internal and external issues and develop policies to prevent them happening again. The reason? The pace of change is rapidly increasing while the size of business-necessary components is shrinking.
Businesses are facing the same problem of how to corral large amounts of data, make sense of it, and leverage it for better efficiency and profitability. But when disruptions occur, oftentimes it’s difficult to quickly pinpoint the origins and nature of disruptions before end users detect them and they become an encumbrance toward business profitability and more.
In the past, organizations relied on traditional monitoring, which identifies known issues and risks. They used a tried-and-true monitoring maturity model to see where they sat in their monitoring journeys – and where they could or should go.
Today, data is processed and exchanged via many different pathways — servers, VMs, storage, applications, transactions, bookings, or customers browsing websites. In other words, all of these processes are much more complex than they used to be in the past and require a different approach toward overall IT estate visibility.
Right now, retail sales, banking, and other business transactions are increasingly being conducted online with the trend expected to continue indefinitely. Such consumer behavior calls for a sophisticated posture toward digital asset visibility via airtight monitoring policies and practices. Here are five points to consider as a foundation toward leveraging a monitoring maturity model for better operational resilience and efficient mitigation of IT stack disruptions.
1: Infrastructure monitoring– Monitoring basic infrastructure: Networks, operating systems, CPUs, memory and disk space allows you to drill down quickly to explore and mitigate issues before they become serious outages. Alerts can be set to notify your team about serious events that can jeopardize service availability, rather than commonplace infrastructure failures.
2: Basic application monitoring– This involves monitoring basic application processes and log errors, usually on one server. To verify if your web application works as expected, you can set up a transaction monitor. A transaction is a step-by-step scenario that tests workflows in a browser. With a Transaction Recorder, you can securely record your transactions by simply navigating and clicking through your website. The Recorder captures everything you do in the browser, allowing you to monitor shopping processes and verify website functionality.
3: Advanced application monitoring (APM) – Monitoring an application as a holistic item across multiple servers, Infrastructure, applications and data feeds. APM refers to the management of software application performance to ensure an expected level of service. This is typically measured by performance metrics and user experience monitoring. APM solutions aim to detect and pinpoint application performance issues before real users are impacted.
4: End-to-end monitoring-End-to-end monitoring of business transactions, passing through one or more applications, with intelligent alert aggregation: Fundamental to operational resilience. Uptrends’ alerting process is a key component to making sure that the right person gets the message in the right way.
5: Business activity-The ability to see business activity and the impact of issues and outages to a firm’s business or clients is vital for survival in today’s highly competitive operating environment. Positive outcomes will rely on a meaningful display of the success or failure of business activities based on the underlying real-time data from across the entire infrastructure and application components.
Most organizations are familiar with the monitoring maturity model and use it as a tool to build and assess observability capabilities. IT teams more than ever must anticipate and manage the unknown events and risks that lurk around every corner. To do this, there is another dimension required for monitoring maturity – observability.
