Proactive Monitoring: Definitions and Strategies
What is Proactive Monitoring? A Definition
Proactive monitoring is a real-time, automated process that continuously tracks system performance, network infrastructure, and key metrics to detect and prevent potential issues before they cause downtime or failures. By using predictive diagnostics and anomaly detection, proactive monitoring identifies problems early, alerts teams to take immediate action, and ensures the system operates efficiently and reliably.
This approach helps prevent server failures, optimize performance, and secure infrastructure, providing scalable, integrated solutions for businesses of all sizes. With proactive monitoring, issues are addressed before they escalate, minimizing disruptions and maintaining seamless operations.
Proactive vs. Reactive Monitoring
Proactive monitoring entails the use of system-wide monitoring procedures to pinpoint and resolve underlying issues before they result in disruptions. Reactive monitoring only occurs in response to an issue that has already materialized. Reactive Monitoring procedures essentially serve as an investigation into the root cause of an issue while proactive monitoring serves as a preventative measure.
While proactive monitoring does often involve administrators “reacting” to inconsistencies in performance, these actions are still considered preventative because the end-user has not yet been impacted.
How the University of British Columbia (UBC) Utilizes Real-Time Visibility into System Performance
Discover how, by defining thresholds for key performance parameters and alerting operators to problems, UBC is able to manage networked servers by exception – serving as a proactive monitoring example of success.
Why Proactive Monitoring Is Better Than Synthetic Monitoring
Synthetics monitoring involves the simulation of end-user behavior to test functionality and identify performance issues and malfunctions. The results of these tests are used to identify and resolve any disruptions found along user paths.
By nature, synthetic monitoring can be considered an extension of reactive monitoring, as it relies on the examination of the end user experience and therefore cannot identify and diagnose issues in a proactive manner. Also, synthetic monitoring only looks at data sporadically and cannot test the entire set of possible user paths, frequently resulting in missed outages and issues. Proactive monitoring, by definition, takes a holistic approach to IT monitoring and stays ahead of issues by looking for early indicators.
Examples of Proactive Monitoring + Early Indicators
Issues cannot be diagnosed by judging standalone IT metrics. However, when historical data is gathered and a baseline performance level is established, trends in these metrics serve as early indicators of a true problem. Some examples of proactive monitoring early indicators include:
Example 1: Significant Packet Loss
A packet is said to be “lost” when it does not arrive at its destination after being transmitted. Systems rely on the transmission of packets for all internet-based activities. In the event of significant packet loss, an end user could experience a complete service disruption or slow network connectivity. Packet loss percentages must be monitored to ensure service is not impacted by network hardware failure, software malfunctions, or security breaches.
Example 2: Response Time Anomalies and Downward Trends
Ensuring consistent performance involves establishing a baseline for response time and identifying data points that vary from it by a margin of at least 100% or greater. A variation of such a significant degree warrants an investigation into potential underlying causes. From there, network administrators can investigate the discrepancy and resolve any issues that hinder performance. An anomaly is not always an indicator of a more serious issue, however, a pattern of subpar or worsening response times discovered by proactive network monitoring almost always is.
Example 3: Environmental Factors
The definition of proactive monitoring extends beyond basic IT metrics like packet loss and response time. Even environmental factors like computer room temperature fall underneath the umbrella of proactive monitoring. If your computer room or data center becomes overheated, your equipment may be subject to tremendous damage and possible failure. An event like this can be avoided simply by having environmental sensors in your computer that alert you when certain temperature thresholds are breached.
Example 4: Configuration Issues
Something as simple as a configuration issue can result in a serious outage. For example, the interface link on your router is responsible for handling internet traffic. If that link becomes unresponsive, this causes services like web-browsing and external traffic to malfunction. Other common configuration mistakes include not saving a configuration, accidentally changing a device configuration, or simply mistyping commands. Accurate and functioning configurations are critical to the day-to-day operations of your company, and successful organizations should be able to perform proactive application monitoring to identify issues associated with misconfigurations before they impact the end user.
Best Practices for Proactive IT Monitoring
Map Your IT Assets
To monitor your devices, you must first know where they are sitting relative to their environments. Compiling this information and displaying it within a proactive network monitoring map will not only help you visualize the structure of your network, but also help you pinpoint exactly where issues are forming. Having automatic device discovery and mapping procedures in place will help you maintain an updated picture of your environment.
Establish Baselines
Establishing performance baselines based on historical device data is the foundation for all proactive monitoring. Without a baseline, there is no point of reference for labeling data points as anomalies, triggering alerting and notification functions, or observing trends. Baselines should be determined via a combination of historical data analysis and targets set by best practices.
Enable Alerts and Notifications
Your monitoring software should be able to proactively alert IT managers when a resource is on the brink of reaching a critical threshold. Indicators like high traffic on a network switch or dwindling resources on a server supporting business critical applications need to be tended to ASAP. Managers should be able to set up proactive alerts when a device is in an alarm state so they can remedy the problem before the end-user is impacted.
Have an Intelligent Capacity Plan
Having an intelligent capacity plan in place is necessary for ensuring the end user experience is not disrupted. Staying ahead of shortages in or an excess of computational resources requires an intelligent and adaptable plan that is based on advanced analysis of historical data. Organizations should have the mechanisms in place to forecast their capacity needs and proactively monitor applications and other assets for any potential capacity bottlenecks in their near future.
How to implement proactive monitoring
Step 1: Identify and Map Your Hardware
How many routers and switches do you have? How many endpoints? Along with a total device inventory, you need to know where each one is located and how it connects to the rest of your network. Proactive monitoring solutions with mapping capabilities allow you to visualize your entire IT landscape, add and drop hardware automatically, and track device status data in real-time.
Step 2: Pinpoint Your Most Critical Assets
At this stage, you must determine what information is most critical to monitor and collect. IT environments can have tens of thousands of endpoints and devices, making it important to pinpoint which ones have a higher impact on your organization’s success. Devices in this category would typically include switches, routers, firewalls, and servers. Once identified, you must determine which metrics you need to watch to ensure the device is performing optimally and whether you can share that data with your servers.
Step 3: Implement a Proactive Monitoring Solution
Once you have visibility into your IT and a clearly defined prioritization structure, you can then implement monitoring software to automatically record and analyze your organization-wide device and infrastructure data. At this stage, you will be prompted to configure baselines and performance thresholds.
Once these have been established and historical data has been recorded, the software will likely be able to report on device metrics, make forecasts, and discover any trends that would warrant an investigation into potential causes. This is also the opportune time to configure exception-based notifications for items and events that you deem critical.
Step 4: Keep Your Infrastructure Healthy
You must continuously make sure the core switches, routers, and firewalls your network relies on support modern performance monitoring protocols. If they don’t, then you will be limited in the type of performance data you can capture, which will make it much more difficult for you to monitor for and resolve any issues in a timely manner.
Step 5: Add on with Cybersecurity, Automation, and Analytics
Once the foundation of your proactive monitoring strategy has been implemented, you can add layers to improve efficiency and fill in security gaps. For example, automation can be integrated to deploy remediate procedures so that, when metrics exceed or dip below a certain threshold, a preprogrammed sequence will resolve the issue or escalate it to the appropriate personnel.
Cybersecurity functions, like intrusion detection and prevention, can leverage your monitoring infrastructure and the data it collects to sniff out malicious behavior on your systems. Automated Analytical Reporting can be configured to generate and deliver feedback on key trends and patterns in data to stakeholders – allowing your organization to make continuous improvements in productivity.
Proactively Monitor Your Network with Intermapper
Intermapper monitors and maps all your devices, interfaces, servers, and applications 24/7. As your network map updates in real time, color-coded icons give you an at-a-glance view for easy network performance monitoring while proactive alerts are prompted when performance thresholds have been exceeded. Schedule a demo today to see how Intermapper’s proactive network monitoring puts a stop to downtime.
