Infrastructure monitoring is the process of collecting and analyzing data from IT infrastructure, systems, and processes to improve business outcomes and drive value across the whole organization. It is used to collect health and performance data from servers, virtual machines, containers, databases, and other backend components. Infrastructure monitoring provides visibility into the health of backend components that run applications, allowing teams to ensure that critical services are available for users and that they work as expected. It is commonly used to prevent incidents from escalating into outages and to optimize infrastructure use.
Infrastructure monitoring is critical to modern IT operations, as it ensures organizations can respond to issues proactively, preventing loss of time and money. It is the essence of mission-critical, delivering key capabilities such as the ability to optimize business requirements and user experience, the flexibility and scalability to ingest data from a variety of sources, and the ability to handle planned and unplanned traffic spikes.
Infrastructure monitoring software tools capture log files from throughout a network and aggregate them into a single database where they can be sorted, queried, and analyzed manually or by machine algorithms. There are three forms of infrastructure monitoring: hardware, network, and application monitoring. Network monitoring helps to verify that an organizations internal network is functioning appropriately and delivering the expected levels of speed and performance. With today's infrastructure monitoring tools, organizations can track user behavior on applications to obtain operational insights and identify business opportunities.
Benefits of infrastructure monitoring include finding and fixing outages and other infrastructure-related issues quickly, supporting engineering, DevOps, and IT teams that work with and are reliant on application infrastructure, and providing end users a consistent, positive experience, which in turn positively impacts the bottom line.
