Hosted monitoring is fast becoming a key component of any organization’s hybrid cloud infrastructure. Find out why…
The global IT monitoring market is projected to register an impressive growth at 13.6% CAGR through 2031. Hosted monitoring solutions are expected to be one of the key growth engines.
For today’s enterprise technology stack, hosted monitoring solutions are a must-have component. It empowers IT teams to monitor all the systems, devices, applications, traffic, and more in their IT infrastructure with a cloud-based monitoring solution.
DigiconAsia finds out more from Sebastian Krueger, Vice President, APAC, Paessler.
What is a hosted monitoring solution, and how has the need for it evolved?
Sebastian Krueger (SK): There is little doubt that cloud migration has become a foundational pillar for organizations embarking on their digital transformation journey. If you follow the cloud-first approach, you will inevitably have virtual devices that reside on the Internet on providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure.
Establishing or adopting a method to monitor your hybrid network is essential to ensuring the success of your company and the security of your organization’s information. This entails solutions that can automatically detect and respond to threats and performance issues in real-time, as well as predict possible issues in the future.
A traditional network monitoring tool monitors every aspect of local and distributed networks, including bandwidth, hardware, and the CPU usage of virtual machines. However, today’s cloud-based network monitoring tool runs in the cloud and performs all the essential actions without the need to be hosted by a dedicated in-house server.
These cloud-based or hosted tools are usually more flexible, less expensive, and easier to use. As modern workplaces continue to evolve faster than ever, it has become imperative to have a monitoring solution that is flexible to fulfill these changing requirements accordingly.
Why has hosted monitoring become a critical component of the IT toolkit today? What are the benefits it brings in addressing the challenges of streamlining IT costs and monitoring today’s hybrid infrastructure?
SK: Easy Implementation – Hosted monitoring is a holistic solution that allows firms to engage a third-party host and start monitoring their networks right away, regardless of the server or platform used by the organization. This makes the implementation of network monitoring easier for organizations which lack skilled IT manpower to set up network monitoring systems in their hybrid cloud infrastructure, as no set-up or installation is required.
Cutting Implementation Time and Costs – Hosted monitoring enables organizations to set up network monitoring solutions for their infrastructure quickly and affordably. Hosted monitoring solutions are housed on trusted servers by a third-party provider. Hence, organizations do not have to invest an extravagant amount of money in purchasing the hardware and servers to run their network monitors.
Scalability – As organizations adopting hosted monitoring on hybrid cloud infrastructure do not need to install hardware, they are able to upscale or downscale their monitoring systems easily. Additionally, engaging a provider which offers a wide variety of pricing and licenses for hosted monitoring services will allow organizations to select the plan that best fits their needs.
Consolidated View of Infrastructure – With remote probes and consolidated dashboards, firms which incorporate hosted monitoring can obtain real-time information about the status of their cloud infrastructure. The dashboards can provide a full overview of the hybrid infrastructure, alerting organizations whenever it detects a potential system failure.
How do hosted monitoring solutions preempt and prevent the negative impact of downtime on the revenue and reputation of an organization? What are their contributions to observability and real-time actionable insights?
SK: Hosted monitoring services ensure round-the-clock monitoring of its users’ infrastructure. Even if the organization is to encounter a system downtime, the externally hosted network monitoring system will continue running to keep firms and their customers updated on the real-time status of their critical infrastructure.
In addition, when the hosted monitoring services provided by the vendor are housed on a reliable cloud platform like AWS, organizations will be guaranteed the best security and performance out of their monitoring system, improving the end-user experience.
Data centers continue to prioritize downtime as a key component of their SLA. As they are distributed across multiple locations, how can hosted monitoring provide an integrated solution?
SK: As multinationals continue relocating their data centers to Southeast Asia, it is becoming clear that the region is becoming the new global data center hotbed. Within the region itself, data centers are now an essential infrastructure for many organizations that are accelerating digitalization. A major challenge for data centers, however, is that devices and infrastructure are often spread over multiple geographic locations.
By facilitating the integration of the cloud with gateways, communication servers, and physical monitoring devices such as sensors through distributed monitoring techniques, hosted monitoring systems allow organizations to have a real-time overview of their entire IT infrastructure.
Along with data traffic and applications, it also monitors technical equipment (server racks, storage systems, computers, and routers), operational facilities (essentials like cooling systems and power systems), and security on both a digital and physical level.
Even in the case of an internet outage, a hosted monitoring system can continue its monitoring, record results, and send notifications. A hosted monitoring tool is able to support data centers across multiple locations by comprehensively monitoring all constituents of a data center, visualizing IT networks using real-time maps with live status, and summarizing details in processes.
