Logicalis US Asks CIOs Five Key Questions about Enterprise IT Monitoring

NEW YORK, May 19, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- To ensure the availability of high-performance, mission-critical IT services, IT departments need both solid monitoring capabilities and dedicated IT resources to resolve issues as they occur.  But even with the right tools in place, when an abundance of alerts and alarms start streaming in, it can quickly become overwhelming, particularly when an IT staff has been asked to focus its time and attention on activities that both support the organization's end users and add to the company's bottom line.  According to Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (www.us.logicalis.com), this may be the time to consider outsourcing the monitoring of IT systems to experts who have years of experience and instinctively know what to monitor and which alarm thresholds to employ.

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"The question CIOs have to answer with regard to IT monitoring is whether or not they are getting the best value out of the tools they are using," says Michael Strysik, Services Principal, Logicalis US. "When alerts are flooding in, are they able to efficiently filter the 'noise' to be able to focus on the top issues that are the root cause of the problem impacting the environment? A managed service provider experienced in monitoring IT environments for customers will be able to bring a lot of intellectual property to the table.  They are accustomed to monitoring and managing a 24x7 environment for thousands of devices across an array of heterogeneous environments.  At the end of the day, for many customers, it makes sense to take advantage of a managed services model rather than trying to recreate that expertise in house."

Five Key Questions about Enterprise IT Monitoring
To help CIOs assess whether they want to keep IT monitoring in house or explore outsourcing to a skilled managed services partner, Logicalis US suggests CIOs ask themselves five important questions.

1. Is your monitoring tool configured properly? Most organizations have off-the-shelf monitoring tools that gather information from all of the devices on their network.  The information coming from these tools can be overwhelming, and while it may be helpful to have access to all of that data, weeding through it in crunch-time can be cumbersome.  To limit alerts to those that are most important takes training, knowledge and expertise, which leads many organizations that want to manage IT monitoring in house to employ full-time experts just to configure and manage their monitoring tools.
2. Do you update regularly? Since rules are continually being added to monitoring tools, monitoring isn't an "implement and forget it" situation, which means IT departments spend a considerable amount of time making sure the tools they depend on for alerts are as current and up-to-date as possible.
3. Can your tool provide event correlation? A single network error can have a ripple effect impacting applications that would otherwise be completely unrelated.  As a result, it's critical that an IT monitoring tool provide event correlation to speed diagnosis and remediation in all affected areas.
4. Does your monitoring tool offer historical trending data? When managing an enterprise environment, IT pros need to analyze historical trend data to identify recurring issues as well as to do capacity planning which, in many cases, can help prevent issues before they arise.  Some of today's popular monitoring tools, however, either operate in real time or store historical data for 30 days or less.  Knowing what your tool offers is important information since being able to intelligently analyze and manage an organization's IT environment can depend on having access to this historical data long term.
5. Do you have the right expertise in house? In an enterprise IT environment, it's important to consider internal staffing needs and the expertise required to manage the monitoring tools and process in house.  Keeping an enterprise environment up and running is no longer IT's value-add; it's an expectation.  Today, most organizations want their IT staff delivering business results, which is why it may make sense to consider outsourcing monitoring to a third party skilled in assessing and limiting incident reports to only the handful that a busy internal staff actually needs to address.

Want to Learn More?

• Learn what it takes to support business-critical operations with mature managed services in this short Logicalis video: http://ow.ly/MP08b.
• The value of shared resources is having access to a senior-level staff on demand 24x7; find out how one Logicalis client reduced IT costs by 55 percent while providing a better level of service to its users by outsourcing its IT monitoring and management: http://ow.ly/MP3e7.
• Learn about the six surprise benefits of managed services here: http://ow.ly/MP3vV.

About Logicalis
Logicalis is an international IT solutions and managed services provider with a breadth of knowledge and expertise in communications and collaboration, data center and cloud services, and managed services.

Logicalis employs over 4,000 people worldwide, including highly trained service specialists who design, specify, deploy and manage complex IT infrastructures to meet the needs of almost 6,000 corporate and public sector customers.  To achieve this, Logicalis maintains strong partnerships with technology leaders such as Cisco, HP, IBM, EMC, NetApp, Microsoft, VMware and ServiceNow on an international basis and has specialized solutions for enterprise and medium-sized companies in vertical markets covering financial services, telecommunications, media and technology, education, healthcare, retail, government, manufacturing and professional services helping customers benefit from cutting-edge technologies in a cost-effective way.

The Logicalis Group has annualized revenues of over $1.5 billion from operations in Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific and is one of the leading IT and communications solution integrators specializing in the areas of advanced technologies and services.

The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on the Johannesburg and London AIM Stock Exchanges, with revenues of approximately $6 billion.

For more information, visit www.us.logicalis.com.

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Media contacts:
Lisa Dreher, VP, Marketing & Business Development
Logicalis US
[email protected]  
425-201-8111
www.us.logicalis.com

Karen Franse, Communication Strategy Group for Logicalis US
[email protected]
866-997-2424
www.gocsg.com

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SOURCE Logicalis US

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