Enterprises are yet to hit a sweet spot with their IT infrastructure monitoring. Despite investing thousands of dollars and getting a bunch of monitoring tools, it is almost always true that the customer catches the issue before the monitoring tool does. In today’s time, teams are looking at more than just monitoring tools. In fact, they want a system that can detect and resolve the issue in the same platform without any delays or intervention. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 70% of organizations successfully applying observability will achieve shorter latency for decision-making, enabling competitive advantage for target business or IT processes. 

Traditional monitoring tools are ridden with challenges that make their users less competitive against their counterparts with modern observability systems. The biggest drawback of traditional monitoring tools is being asynchronous. This means that the issues may not be detected immediately or proactively and would lead to delays in addressing problems and increased downtimes. Secondly, the IT infrastructure is made up of various systems from different vendors and the information resides in silos. This creates a fragmented view that hinders seeing the big picture in a single screen. Thirdly, most traditional tools are not microservices-ready or cloud-ready, leading to creating gaps in monitoring. These coupled with the complex dynamic environment, due to the accelerated rate at which technology gets released and implemented, have become a huge problem to solve for IT teams. 

Digitate, an enterprise AI and automation software company, offers an end-to-end observability suite that includes modern monitoring techniques to combat the above issues. 

Synthetic Monitoring: Finding issues before your customer finds them 

Put your app-anxiety to rest by using this powerful technique that emulates user behavior on a website or application and finds issues before the customer notices them. For businesses like ecommerce, addressing issues after they have impacted the customers it is futile. 

By running simulations, you can compare the results with how the site is supposed to behave and identify issues faster. 

For example, you are running an ecommerce website, and you find many abandoned carts – it could be due to an issue that is preventing the transaction from getting completed. By running synthetic monitoring, you can simulate the user action to identify the issues in completing this transaction. By spotting these issues before your customers, you can get them fixed and prevent your customers from abandoning carts and going to competitors. 

Constantly running such simulations in the production environment can help you gain confidence that your website or application is running smoothly. Using this technique, your team is prepared for peak times and can enable actions before an entire system or process gets disrupted. It can also validate your complex operations when just performing availability monitoring is not sufficient. Your team can also save thousands of dollars by adhering to the SLAs.  

Kubernetes Monitoring: Elevating cluster health 

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, which facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. Kubernetes monitoring helps DevOps and IT Teams in identifying issues and proactively managing complex Kubernetes (K8) clusters. It pinpoints issues such as insufficient resources, high CPU usage, failures and more in the pods, nodes and containers in the K8 environment. When hundreds of microservices are being created and destroyed in making calls to one another, traditional monitoring tools struggle to find the issues in Kubernetes effectively, However, with modern tools like Digitate’s ignio Observe, you can collect information to tackle operational issue and areas of improvement.  

Implementing K8 monitoring as one of the monitoring techniques has several benefits. Firstly, by accessing logs, metrics, and traces, it is possible to exactly pinpoint the issues helping diagnose and resolve issues faster. Thus, areas of inefficiency can be identified and can be resolved for optimum performance resulting in better application responsiveness. Secondly, using Kubernetes monitoring, it is possible to ramp up capacity planning to ensure that the infrastructure can scale up with changes in demand. Finally, optimizing resources and gaining efficiency will lead to reduced maintenance costs. 

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer: Traffic analysis 

NetFlow is used to monitor traffic over the network. By analyzing this traffic, you can gauge how the traffic flows across the network including source, destination, congestion points and volume. It helps optimize the network traffic so that you don’t spend money on the bandwidth that is not required. The main benefit of using this monitoring technique is the detection of the latency and transfer rate between two network devices and the understanding about the devices that need attention. 

DNS Monitoring: Securing organizations online presence 

DNS monitoring is the continuous observation on the Domain Name Server (DNS) for safeguarding and optimizing DNS components against potential threats or attacks. The main benefit is that it improves the performance and reliability of web-based applications. Also, using DNS monitoring, issues can be responded to faster resulting in reduced downtime and improved customer satisfaction.  

Distributed tracing: Making monitoring microservices-ready 

Distributed tracing helps in monitoring data requests as it flows through distributed systems. Using this monitoring technique, developers can visually follow the data flow across different microservices and immediately respond to errors or bug fixes and performance issues. The topmost advantage of distributed tracing is the monitoring and debugging of the issues that traditional tools cannot detect. This eventually helps decrease MTTD/MTTR and minimize development costs. 

In conclusion, effective monitoring is quintessential for a robust business environment. It offers valuable insights into business health and performance. Detecting issues rapidly and taking swift actions can help companies save on customer loyalty and costs. By replacing traditional tools and leveraging modern monitoring techniques, you can ensure that your application is running smoothly, it meets user expectations and adheres to the compliance standards set by the organization.Â