Telemetry: Optimize IT management with real-time monitoring

The role of telemetry in IT infrastructure management

In the 1980s and 1990s, companies started using telemetry to manage their IT infrastructures. Although SNMP already existed at that time, this protocol was designed for traditional networks and was not optimized for handling large volumes of data in real time. SNMP transmitted information by polling or periodic requests, which limited its ability to respond to critical events. Telemetry, on the other hand, was capable of continuously collecting data from devices and delivering this information without time lags. This is how it became an indispensable tool for optimizing the performance of systems and applications in critical areas such as data centers, telecommunications networks or in the financial sector, where any unexpected delay or failure can affect service continuity.

How does telemetry work in IT networks?

Telemetry systems use different components at each stage to collect, send and process data:

Data collection

Telemetry begins with data collection using sensors, which can be physical devices (e.g., a temperature or pressure sensor) or software-based agents and modules that are integrated into the operating system of the device to be monitored.

Data transmission

The transducer converts the analog signals captured by the sensors into digital data. This data is then compressed using a multiplexing system and transmitted to a central station via a communication network, which can be wireless, cable, radio waves, satellite, etc. To ensure stable communication, the information is encrypted and travels via secure protocols such as HTTP or MQTT.

Data processing

Once the data is received, it is demodulated and decoded to convert it to a standard, actionable format. Inconsistencies are then corrected or eliminated and finally combined with data from other sources and sensors to obtain a unified block of information.

Data storage

Already processed data is stored in relational databases, cloud storage platforms or data lakes, which are repositories designed to store structured data optimized for real-time analysis.

IT infrastructure monitoring

Real-time monitoring is the last phase of this process. The main objective of telemetry is to collect, process and analyze data to obtain useful information for decision making. Monitoring solutions such as Pandora FMS facilitate the interpretation of telemetry data, presenting it in graphs, diagrams and dashboards that are understandable to people. Thanks to this intuitive view, IT teams can identify patterns, detect anomalies and predict failures before they occur. This proactive approach is vital to optimize network performance, reducing downtime and costs associated with reactive maintenance. But Pandora FMS is not only a useful tool in IT infrastructure management. Thanks to its integration with other business intelligence (BI) platforms, it allows you to take advantage of historical data obtained with telemetry to analyze trends, optimize resources, find areas for improvement and build strategies aligned with business objectives.

Benefits of telemetry in IT infrastructure management

As companies go digital, so does their dependence on IT infrastructures. These must be secure, scalable and sustainable in terms of resource usage, something that can only be achieved with a holistic view of the system.

Telemetry plays an important role in this process, as it provides IT teams with accurate information on the status of each component. Some of its outstanding benefits are:

• Total system visibility: Telemetry provides real-time visibility to monitor response times, resource usage and other important network performance metrics. IT teams can quickly identify suspicious activity, such as unauthorized access attempts or unusual traffic patterns, and correct these threats at an early stage before a critical failure occurs. In addition, telemetry data is also useful for compliance audits, which contribute to the proactive maintenance of the IT infrastructure.
• Early problem detection: Gartner predicts that by 2025, companies that invest in advanced infrastructure management solutions will reduce downtime by 80%. Unexpected service outages translate into financial losses and delays in business decisions. In this context, telemetry plays an important role, providing up-to-date information on the health of systems. This helps to detect early problems that could have a negative impact on productivity, such as bottlenecks or slow service delivery.
• Resource optimization: Telemetry provides key data for resource optimization such as traffic patterns or application usage behavior. This is especially useful in complex networks with many connected devices, where certain resources may be underutilized.

Telemetry use cases with Pandora FMS

IT teams strive every day to meet the demands of an ever-changing business environment. More and more companies are migrating their workloads to the cloud and opting for a flexible IT infrastructure, using technologies such as containers, microservices and Kubernetes.

Multi-cloud or hybrid cloud architectures are agile and highly scalable. They also allow companies to reduce dependency on a single provider and improve the resilience of their systems. However, this complexity also presents a significant challenge when it comes to monitoring network performance. A report by 451 Research shows that only 11% of decision makers are satisfied with their current monitoring tools, while 83% are looking for new services to broaden their approach.

What is going wrong with traditional monitoring tools?

• Many of them were not designed for real-time monitoring or to handle high traffic peaks.
• They are oriented to basic networks and monolithic infrastructures. They are not prepared to work in distributed environments, since they create isolated data silos.
• They are often limited in the type of data they process, resulting in security gaps for users.
• They generate too much data and alerts that overload IT teams, making it difficult to identify critical issues.

Next we will explain the advantages of integrating Pandora FMS with your current telemetry system.

Real-time monitoring and end-to-end visibility

Pandora FMS is a comprehensive solution for monitoring complex technological environments formed by different servers, applications or databases. It is especially useful in telemetry systems that collect data from widely dispersed sources such as sensors located in different geographical areas. It is also effective for monitoring modern applications based on microservices, serverless functions or containers. These applications are increasingly dynamic and require fast and accurate data collection as each component is independent of the others and runs in different environments or servers. This is where traditional monitoring tools often fall short, as they were designed for managing monolithic infrastructures, where all the code runs on a single instance. Distributed environments are much more complex because user requests traverse different components and services before being processed. This increases the possibility of bottlenecks that are difficult to detect without the right tools.

To overcome this limitation, Pandora FMS offers end-to-end visibility. Each user request is assigned a unique identifier that allows tracking its path through multiple services. Thanks to this approach, IT teams can better understand data flows and identify problems that develop slowly and would go unnoticed without a monitoring tool that provides full visibility.

Alert noise reduction

Alert fatigue is a common problem in large and complex IT infrastructures due to the sheer number of notifications generated by monitoring systems. IT teams are often overwhelmed by constant alerts, many of which can be false positives. Alert noise generates work stress and can cause delays in responding to real incidents. Pandora FMS allows administrators to customize and filter alerts so that only relevant and urgent events are notified. Thresholds are configured automatically, based on historical data behavior.

In addition, in distributed environments, Pandora FMS can group alerts to avoid redundancy.

Telemetry vs. observability – what is the difference?

“Telemetry” and “Observability” are sometimes used as synonyms in monitoring contexts, but they are actually different concepts. Telemetry is a technology that relies on the collection, transmission and analysis of data for system optimization. This data is usually raw, such as CPU usage, network latency, application errors, etc.

In contrast, observability takes a broader and more holistic approach. It emerged in the 1960s within a field of engineering called Control Theory and its creator was the Hungarian-American scientist Rudolf Kalman.

In simple terms, observability refers to the ability to determine the internal state of a system by observing its outputs, which in the case of IT infrastructures would be metrics, logs and events.

Observability does not replace monitoring, on the contrary, it depends on it to obtain complete visibility of systems, although it broadens its focus by using data correlation to diagnose performance problems or systemic failures. Pandora FMS integrates telemetry and observability to get a deep insight into the IT environment. It is not only able to monitor systems, but also to understand their behavior. To meet this objective it incorporates a number of features:

Instrumentation

Pandora FMS collects telemetry data from applications, services and systems, even if they perform their operations in distributed environments. These metrics can be visualized in customized dashboards that display the information in real time.

Correlation of events

Pandora FMS uses AI and machine learning algorithms to relate different types of events such as errors, transactions or system status events to each other. For example, it can link the slow operation of an application to a CPU overload. This helps IT technicians identify patterns and make efficient, proactive management of infrastructures.

Root-cause analysis

Root-cause analysis (RCA) is the most effective way to address issues and prevent them from recurring. Administrators can spend more than 65% of their time isolating problems if they do not have the right monitoring solutions. Pandora FMS provides auditing and traceability tools that facilitate this process.

Telemetry implementation with Pandora FMS

Implementing a complete monitoring of an organization requires several steps that have to be done progressively. It must be taken into account that in most cases organizations maintain a changing IT infrastructure. Therefore, the last “phase” of the implementation is a continuous work cycle.

Phases in the implementation of monitoring with Pandora FMS.

• Installation phase
  • Preparation of an asset inventory.
  • Installation of Pandora FMS monitoring server and its different components (databases, satellite servers, etc).
  • Installation of Pandora FMS monitoring agents in the different equipments to be monitored.
  • Discovery of remote monitoring of networked equipment or equipment where monitoring agents cannot be installed.
• Consultative Phase:
  • Development of an inventory of critical services.
  • Development of an inventory of alerts and escalations.
  • Development of operating procedures.
  • Elaboration of a complete monitoring inventory.
• Service operation and continuous review:
  • Adjustment of thresholds, modification of scaling.
  • Incorporation of new monitoring elements and elimination of eliminated systems.
  • System maintenance.