Let’s face it. IT monitoring by any other name is still IT monitoring. You’ve probably heard the same pitches before and no doubt are immune to the catch phrases and claims of being the best. There’s no such thing as the best solution – only what’s best for you.

And that depends on what you are looking for in an IT monitoring solution – it’s no longer about the what. We have established that all monitoring vendors know what to monitor. The trick is not the what: it’s the how.

Cutting down on multiplicity

For that we need to look at the architecture. Most monitoring firms use a point-to-point approach but in time that approach becomes ineffective – especially when you start adding more technologies to the infrastructure. IT teams use disparate point products to monitor specific technologies, each with separate interfaces, databases, infrastructures and administrators. The ongoing management of each tool is too time-consuming, risky, expensive, and complex.

In the application economy where speed is of the essence, this cumbersome approach may mean the difference between a successful deployment and a missed deadline.

There’s more than one way to monitor IT

Another approach is to develop the architecture based on a library of APIs, written on a message bus technology. This type of architecture is perfect for distributed computing, virtualized environments and public and private cloud infrastructures.

A message bus architecture as a core element of the platform gives you a streamlined, comprehensive and efficient way of monitoring your entire infrastructure from the data center to the cloud

Why message bus architecture is suited to hybrid IT environments

It enables all monitoring components to communicate with each other, without direct program-to-program connections and acts as an abstraction layer between the core system and the monitoring probes. A message bus architecture has built-in resiliency with “store-and-forward” mechanisms and uses modular, independent components that work together to deliver a broad array of capabilities without creating a massive deployment.

This type of architecture improves agility as components can be developed and tested in isolation. Each component can be validated when the component publishes or consumes messages from the bus and is verified by examining the associated messages.

All monitoring firms claim to offer customizable portals, dashboards and reports that give end-to-end visibility into applications, servers, networks, databases and the end-user experience. The next time you are speaking with an IT monitoring firm – Don’t Ask What. Ask How.

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