Infrastructure monitoring Tools: The Market for Monitoring Tools
A recent study by Gartner about IT infrastructure monitoring tools (or infrastructure monitoring tools, June 6, 2017) indicates that with the emergence of modular cloud-centric architectures, many organizations are spending their I & O budget (Infrastructure and Operation) on monitoring tools for servers, networks and storage systems. Enterprise CIOs must adopt comprehensive tools to monitor their IT infrastructure to gain visibility into each one of their environments.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring tools (ITIM) capture the availability of infrastructure components that reside in a data center, or those that are housed in the cloud as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).
These tools monitor and classify metrics for availability and utilization of server resources, networks, database instances, virtual machine monitors, and storage. More specifically, these tools collect metrics in real time and perform the analysis of historical data and trends of the elements they monitor.
Figure 1: infrastructure monitoring tools add data from multiple sources and allow easy visualization of metrics, trends and analysis.
infrastructure monitoring tools also make data available to other IT operation management tools (ITOMs) used in event processes, availability, capacity, IT service management (ITSM-IT Service Management), automation and performance.
infrastructure monitoring tools allow you to send alerts to the appropriate roles and provide a visualization of the data they collect for later analysis. They help CIOs mitigate operational risks and optimize monitoring costs by:
- Increasing the visibility and understanding of the IT infrastructure.
- Improving accuracy in anomaly and alert detection.
- Making diagnosis and problem solving easier.
- Reducing interruptions and increasing infrastructure availability.
- Integrating the analysis and correlation of events and the inherited tools.
- Integrating AIOps tools for centralized visibility and better analysis.
I & O managers often evaluate these tools when they make major changes to their technology, or during data center modernization initiatives. They often evaluate them when they are about to renew the contracts of the tools they already have.
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Where’s the market headed to?
The market of infrastructure monitoring tools is witnessing the emergence of new operators that are catering to increasingly more hybrid, modular and cloud-based environments.
Infrastructure monitoring tools are helping organizations simplify and unify monitoring different areas (servers, storage, databases, networks, etc) within a single tool, eliminating the problems of multi-tool integrations and freeing up budget for other needs in I & O.
When choosing a monitoring tool, the CIO should:
- Give priority to infrastructure monitoring tools, selecting those that offer better integration and interoperability with broader ITOM tools.
- Reduce tool management overload by selecting vendors who have modern user interfaces and who are prepared for emerging technologies such as containers and IoT (Internet of Things).
For Gartner, “modern IT represents a challenge for traditional legacy tools, which were designed to work on static IT infrastructures, with minimal changes”.
Modern trends challenge the “availability of infrastructure” paradigm, where infrastructure is assumed to be fairly constant. In the last five years, the infrastructure monitoring tools market has moved towards integral monitoring, thus moving away from domain-specific monitoring (servers, databases, network, etc.). Currently, the following trends are marking the general direction of the market:
Figure 2: Trends affecting the market of infrastructure monitoring tools (ITIM)
Most organizations have five or more technologies to monitor their IT infrastructure. There is a growing interest in having a single control panel that unifies the data that comes from all the monitoring tools.
The consolidation of infrastructure monitoring tools reduces costs and complexity, while improving overall management capabilities, so it has to be considered a priority for infrastructure and operation managers.
Monitoring tools are evolving
Suppliers of IT monitoring tools are incorporating additional features into their products:
- Several include log analytics and / or flow-based network monitoring for a basic view of performance.
- They are offering topological views and maps of dependencies of the IT infrastructure, which help to make a faster diagnosis of the problems and their causes. In the past this feature was offered within Network Fault Management (NFM tools).
- Vendors are using basic pattern recognition to provide dynamic thresholds that help eliminate the manual efforts required to update thresholds, ensuring that events are categorized appropriately by criticality.
- The trend among vendors is evolving towards an IT architecture or a SaaS (Software as a Service) model to configure IT monitoring.
- At the same time, the ease of deployment and minimal configuration are considered as necessary features of these tools.
- Increasingly, reports and control panels that go beyond the view of IT components are being requested.
- Finally, functionalities have to be incorporated to address the new requirements that technological evolution entails.
Global overview of suppliers
The global market of infrastructure monitoring tools is seeing a number of new suppliers entering, mainly with offers based on Open Source technologies, focused on small and medium companies (SMEs).
Commercial product offers from some smaller suppliers compete with established suppliers, not only in price but also in capabilities.
In its report “Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools”, Gartner includes Árctica as a representative supplier with its product, Pandora FMS.
Figure 3: List of infrastructure monitoring tools sellers according to Gartner study “Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools” of June 6, 2017.
Pandora FMS is the most flexible monitoring solution on the market, with global coverage, which meets all market needs and with the best TCO, offering more functionalities than other manufacturers. We adapt to your organization and not the other way around, because your needs are our goals.
If you have noticed that you need a good infrastructure monitoring tool while reading this article, do not hesitate to contact us. Visit our website (https://pandorafms.com/) and start enjoying today all the benefits of monitoring with Pandora FMS.
About Pandora FMS
Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring system, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.
Of course, one of the things that Pandora FMS can control is the hard disks of your computers.
Would you like to know more about what Pandora FMS can offer you? Discover it by entering here: https://pandorafms.com
If you have more than 100 devices to monitor, you can contact us through the following form: https://pandorafms.com/en/contact/
Also, remember that if your monitoring needs are more limited you have at your disposal the OpenSource version of Pandora FMS. Find more information here: https://pandorafms.org
Pandora FMS’s editorial team is made up of a group of writers and IT professionals with one thing in common: their passion for computer system monitoring. Pandora FMS’s editorial team is made up of a group of writers and IT professionals with one thing in common: their passion for computer system monitoring.
