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Updated reviews by IT News Specialists. Keep yourself aware of the best monitoring solutions available for Large and Medium IT Infrastructures and Networks. A comprehensive overview of the landscape of vendors and solutions through the eyes of both systemadmins and a businessperson's.
In a world where enterprise IT is getting larger and more complex, large infrastructure monitoring faces several challenges that might not arise in small to medium networks. Many different IT layers need to be converged, many vendor-specific devices, technologies, and monitoring tools need to be integrated, there are different processes for various specialized and distributed teams, and there is a need for the unified monitoring of multiple distributed locations, to name just a few challenges for complex and large IT environments. Our Newsroom Consultants have collected some of large IT infrastructure monitoring tools on the market that are able to face these challenges.
There are plenty of network monitoring tools and utilities out there, which include commercial products and open-source solutions alike. On the one hand, this is good news for IT administrators because there is a strong demand for network performance monitoring software. On the other hand, the wide array of network monitoring tools makes it difficult to choose the perfect solution for your own infrastructure. Most solutions offer a free trial to find out if the monitoring tool fits your company’s needs. Our Newsroom Consultants put the leading network monitoring solutions to the test and cross-compared the best network monitoring tools for 2022.
The Domain Name System is a service that – simply stated – resolves human-friendly domain names into a computer-understandable IP address. This IP address enables the browser to find the server. The combination of host name and IP address forms the so-called namespace. A DNS is a hierarchical distributed database, each containing a piece of information leading to a particular web page or device on the network. The system uses TCP and UDP for transmission and is probably one of the busiest databases in the world.
When looking for the perfect solution, consider other factors as well! IT monitoring is a very complex field. If we want to simplify it a bit, we can divide it into the following 3 fields: Classic IT infrastructure monitoring, network performance monitoring, and application performance monitoring. The first one represents the classic challenges of every sysadmin, it includes the monitoring of standard applications or servers as well as hardware, storage, and other infrastructure elements. Network performance monitoring is aimed at routers, firewalls, or switches and, of course, all data streams that pass through these devices. And the comparatively newer application performance monitoring covers CRM systems or entire websites. It is in the nature of network performance monitoring that it usually runs on-site.
In today’s world, virtual servers play an important role in IT infrastructure. Virtual machines enable dynamic allocation of resources, increased availability, and, last but not least, cost savings. Larger companies, in particular, rely heavily on reliable virtual machines, which is why virtual machine monitoring is essential. VM Monitoring allows you to monitor the virtual machines, the hypervisors, and the physical servers on which they are running. This ensures that you are always aware of availability and performance, and can react quickly in the event of any errors or failures. We have compared the best virtual machine monitoring tools and offered our recommendations.
In IT terminology, logging stands for the automated recording of events and status messages that are continuously generated during the operation of IT systems or the execution of software processes. These can be error or status messages. The task of log management is to collect, summarize and store all this log data. This is what makes it possible to search, analyze and create reports in the first place. The log files created by logging contain information and events that are time-stamped and arranged chronologically in the file. Since the files are often limited in size, either several files are created, or the content is overwritten after a certain time.
The Internet of Things – IoT for short – emerged as a buzzword in 2015 (at the latest), subsequently becoming increasingly popular (and – admittedly – some people can’t hear it anymore). However, the core behind the term is a functioning technology that is indispensable in both the private and business sectors. Revenue on the Internet of Things market will amount to around €1,177 million in the current year 2022. Revenue is now even expected to show an annual growth rate of over 9% between 2022 and 2027, resulting in a projected market volume of nearly €1,900 million in 2027. In many branches of the economy, IoT will unfold its disruptive character in the coming years.
SNMP is widely seen as a legacy protocol, and Microsoft and Google even pronounced that SNMP was dead. This might be correct in a way, since SNMP is not actively worked on anymore. However, the benefits of SNMP are still undeniable, particularly for network monitoring. As SNMP is still the common network monitoring language, most network components across all vendors have a built-in SNMP capability. With SNMP, you are able to monitor really diverse network parameters from CPU load, disk usage, bandwidth, traffic, overall uptime, to environmental parameters like temperature etc. And SNMP is still unparalleled regarding its low performance impact.
Application Performance Monitoring – or APM – deals with the performance monitoring of applications. The goal is to provide users with an optimal operating experience when using a particular piece of software or an entire software package. APM tools provide administrators with data that they can use to identify negative influences and problems in application performance. Ideally, admins will be presented with data straight away that will help them eliminate the problems. APM monitoring tools can be designed specifically for one application or for monitoring multiple applications on the same network. They collect data on CPU performance, memory usage, bandwidth, and data flow.
