{"id":16568,"date":"2021-09-22T12:30:01","date_gmt":"2021-09-22T16:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/?p=16568"},"modified":"2024-06-12T06:53:39","modified_gmt":"2024-06-12T10:53:39","slug":"what-is-proactive-monitoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/what-is-proactive-monitoring\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding Proactive Monitoring: Definitions and Strategies"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nSo what is “Proactive Monitoring?”… Let’s start with a dictionary definition…<\/p>\n
The Dictionary Definition of Proactive<\/strong>
\nProactive \/pr\u0259\u028a\u02c8akt\u026av\/<\/p>\n

Adjective:<\/b> (of a person or action) creating or controlling a situation rather than just responding to it after it has happened.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

What is Proactive Monitoring?<\/h2>\n

\"Proactive monitoring involves continuously identifying potential issues within IT infrastructure and applications before they escalate into significant challenges. This approach allows businesses to address problems before they cause application crashes or performance degradation. By resolving issues early, proactive monitoring ensures smoother operations and enhances user experience.<\/p>\n

In practice, proactive monitoring detects potential problems before users notice and complain, thus avoiding business impacts. Unlike reactive monitoring, which identifies failures after they occur, proactive monitoring alerts IT administrators to issues well in advance. This allows for timely intervention, maintaining optimal performance and reliability. Proactive monitoring means constantly searching for signs that indicate a problem is about to happen, enabling businesses to operate more efficiently and effectively.<\/p>\n

Proactive monitoring<\/a> is the opposite of reactive monitoring. While reactive monitoring detects failures after something has gone wrong, proactive monitoring alerts IT administrators to potential issues well before the issue becomes a failure.<\/p>\n

By avoiding business impacting failures, proactive monitoring helps to enhance service uptime and performance, increases customer trust, and enables increased efficiency in IT operations.<\/p>\n

Formal Industry Standards Around Proactive Monitoring<\/h2>\n

\"AWSThe AWS MSP Partner Program<\/a> Validation Audit Checklist contains a useful set of criteria of how AWS want MSPs to proactively build services upon AWS and WorkSpaces, including:<\/p>\n

\u201cAWS Partner offers next-generation monitoring for critical customer workloads. This provides comprehensive monitoring and alerting capabilities that cover all components and layers of the workload, not just the AWS services and resources. This provides operators with visibility into workload health and performance and proactively notifies operators of potential service impacts<\/strong>. The partner has standardized approaches for collecting, integrating, monitoring, and alerting on workload health and performance data at both the infrastructure and application layers, as well as across multiple components of the workload.\u201c<\/p>\n

Basically, Amazon expects MSPs to have monitoring in place that will detect potential service impacts<\/strong> so that service impacts are avoided for end-users. This is where synthetic monitoring simply doesn\u2019t cut it, especially if it does not go beyond Logon Simulations.<\/p>\n

Amazon also expects a \u201cstandardized approach for collecting, integrating, monitoring, and alerting on workload health and performance data at both the infrastructure and application layers<\/strong>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Synthetic Monitoring is Useful but Not Sufficient for Proactive Monitoring<\/h2>\n

\"ProactiveMany monitoring products promise to \u201cproactively monitor your business applications\u201d. When you dig deeper though, you will find that their offering amounts to little more than continuous synthetic transaction testing on the availability of applications, desktops, and network resources \u2013 and are often little more than basic logon simulators. Synthetic transaction testing essentially uses robot users to try and access resources. As synthetic monitoring<\/a> runs 24×7, it may be able to detect problems before real users encounter them because it is accessing the application\/IT infrastructure at times when real users may not. For example, a logon failure at 3am may be detected by synthetic monitoring. Real users may not login at that time, so they may not notice the issue until they login at 7am.<\/p>\n

However, synthetic monitoring simply isn\u2019t true \u201cproactive monitoring\u201d as all you have done is discover a problem that has already occurred. True proactive monitoring should be able to detect problems in advance, even when users are actively accessing the applications\/infrastructure being monitored.<\/p>\n

A Medical Analogy<\/h2>\n

\"ThermometerUsing a synthetic monitoring tool is akin to taking a temperature check on a person. When the temperature is abnormal, you know that there is an issue. But by the time you know that the temperature is abnormal, it is probably late already \u2013 the person is sick! Proactive checks of other key parameters \u2013 blood pressure, blood glucose level, etc. may provide early warning indicators of problems.<\/p>\n

What is Needed for True Proactive IT Monitoring<\/h2>\n

Metrics like service availability and response time are important for assessing performance vs. SLAs. However, they do not provide proactive indicators of a problem. These metrics are often indicative of effects of a problem (symptoms), but the actual problem may be somewhere else.<\/p>\n

There are many other IT metrics that can provide early warning indicators of problems. For example:<\/p>\n