Unified Monitoring—or using an integrated platform that monitors your entire IT infrastructure, including physical, virtual, and cloud—is a proven strategy for reducing service outages, increasing end user and IT productivity, optimizing capital investment, and maintaining industry compliance. The business community has long recognized that productivity and profitability depend upon the smooth functioning of their entire IT environment. As IT infrastructures become more complex, the importance of integrating monitoring tools has as well.
At its core, unified monitoring means that all aspects of IT infrastructure are monitored for availability and performance, including: applications, databases, networks, virtual infrastructures, security systems, and special purpose devices. This universal coverage is unified by combining monitoring data from multiple tools for a complete picture of the performance and availability of the infrastructure. With a unified monitoring approach, you get visibility into metrics of interest from each of these discrete areas, while allowing the individual tools to perform their specialized functions, often with their own managers or teams of managers.
The overall goal of unified monitoring is to centralize the state of the entire IT infrastructure into a single pane of glass. A flexible and vendor neutral tool is important for this task, particularly one that is scalable and robust, yet simple to integrate.
As organizations evolve, many are moving to virtual and cloud-based servers yet still have a need to support their legacy systems. A good unified monitoring solution will provide coverage for both cloud-based and legacy infrastructures.