Top 10 tips for choosing an Infrastructure Management solution

In any enterprise, small or large, as an organisation grows, it is inevitable that the hardware used is sourced from different manufacturers. This in itself isn’t a real issue as that is what must be done if “best of breed” is required. The issue comes in monitoring and managing the environment.

Here are my top 10 tips when choosing the right management solution for you...

10) Don’t be seduced by whiz bang features that you will never need

9) Aim for a few solutions as possible, 1 is best, 2 is ok, 3 is acceptable, any more will become unwieldly and hard to integrate and manage

8) Be clear about what you want to do (don’t confuse routine management tools with one off problem solving tools e.g. wireshark is a great tool, but not really practical for day to day monitoring, it is best at troubleshooting a specific network issue)

7) Consider the deliverables to your customers when choosing a solution (don’t go for complexity if you don’t need it)

6) Think ahead, what are your customers going to need in 6, 9, 12 months’ time when they demand more because the service you give has improved, build it in now

5) The business is built on and betting on the infrastructure, so consider business continuity for your monitoring solution

4) Make sure you have professional support for the solution you choose (free/open source is great, but are you able to fix it yourself when it goes wrong?)

3) Don’t confuse Infrastructure monitoring and management with other requirements (e.g. asset management) while they all will fall within your domain, they don’t always need to be in the same user interface and so may be a separate best of breed solution (just like the infrastructure, you don’t use the same hardware to perform every job)

2) Don’t be frightened to invest time and effort to make your solution do exactly what you need (there are very few that are perfect for you “out of the box”)

1) Ensure that you can embed your own local knowledge into your chosen solution.

Why no emphasis on Business continuity within the I.T. Management infrastructure?

Why is it that in this day and age of buzzwords and phrases like "Business Continuity" there little or no emphasis made on the need for the management tools required by the IT department to be fault tolerent.

There seems to be a big deal made of web farms and clustered sql servers etc. That's fine for the business, but, what happens when the Infrastructure management tools are unavailable?

Picture this: Your only link to the internet is down, your company is losing money because your web shop is unavailable. Your users are screaming, but you can't do any investigation or corrective action because your Management system is offline due to an unforseen server hardware fault! Who is going to get fired for this?

I have been speaking with quite a few prospects recently where they have a look of horror on their face when you ask this question!

So, how many Infrastructure Management tools have been designed with Business Continuity in mind? I know mine does, but, does yours? If it does, please, let me know, what is it called?

Finally, I have a blog

Well, I finally got around to creating a blog. Lets hope I can get the most out of it and actually write some stuff that will be

• useful,
• interesting and
• something that I can understand when I re-read it in the future.