Many see IT investment in monitoring tools as a cost since it doesn’t produce any explicit revenue. However, in today’s world where network connectivity and online presence is a central pillar for just about every business, it becomes apparent that any downtime has an immediate revenue impact associated with it. Either because your online store is down or your employees cannot get their jobs done. Let alone the reputation damage that comes with every period of major system downtime.
This is illustrated in a recent study by Persistence Market Research that forecasts that the global IT infrastructure monitoring market will balloon from $19.2B in 2016 to $34.1B by 2024. That’s a 6.6% CAGR for 2016-2024.
Infrastructure monitoring can be seen as insurance against unforeseen events that could have catastrophic consequences. This is why you have to make sure your monitoring tools cover all possible failure points in your infrastructure. In a growing market there are myriads of tools available, and each one of them addressing specific needs. The most established categories of infrastructure monitoring tools are SNMP, netflow, and packet capturing. The pros and cons of each one of them are well known, and although they are very mature technologies they cannot cover 100% of your infrastructure.
Real User Experience
Real user experience (RUE) monitoring is emerging as a new category of tools. RUE monitoring focuses on capturing how the users on your infrastructure experience the network and applications. And ultimately this is what we care about: whether users can perform their tasks, and that if they are facing network or applications performance degradation issues, we know about it.
The only way to capture RUE is with agents at the same locations with your users. The agents mimic user behavior and report their experience to you. This is like having a real user measuring the network and application performance at each site 24/7 and notifying you when something goes south.
NetBeez and RUE
At NetBeez, we focus on RUE monitoring. Our agents can be installed in WAN, WLAN, virtual, and cloud environments, which enables you to cover all your bases. RUE can be used as a standalone tool or in combination with SNMP, netflow, and packet capturing tools.
So far in my life, I haven’t found the perfect tool that does everything equally well and is able to cover 100% of your infrastructure’s footprint. But there is a combination of tools that can help you achieve your goals. If you have at least one tool in SNMP, netflow, and packet capturing, then it’s time to start looking for a tool like NetBeez for RUE monitoring.
If you want to learn more about NetBeez, you can sign up for a demo here.
