Introduction
Businesses with numerous remote locations still struggle to implement easy-to-maintain and simple-to-use Network Management & Monitoring Systems (NMS). Multisite NMS is on the CIO essential shopping basket for a decade, and we have seen a cloud revolution during this journey. AI & ML has been heavily adopted by most enterprise software. But the industry Network Management Systems (NMS) solutions still follow the ‘if>then’ direction, whereas the ‘digital immune’ and ‘auto-remediation’ are still on baby steps.
But what about a multisite NMS?
We have explained a few essential features of a state-of-the-art NMS should have, especially for a multisite environment.
Early Considerations Before Deciding to Buy a Multisite NMS
AIOps
Monitoring and alerting of a remote site IT infrastructure is not enough. You want your IT operations team stay alert to remediate any issue, regardless business-critical or not. How do you want to treat those situations where:
- These are iIdentical to recently occurred at another site
- Repetitive, but kept your attention busy
- Predictive, follows a ‘what > if >then’ formula. For example, a failover task or power-cycling the system.
An NMS with embedded AIOps can be your savior. When deployed, the NMS monitors your infrastructure and proactively remediates all the above-listed incidents. An event-driven architecture can detect and remediate on-instant, much before you have noticed.
For a legacy NMS, WatchMyDC® can be your savior. WatchMyDC® works as an add-on for your classic NMS. Its event-driven architecture listens for all incidents from your NMS, thereafter WatchMyDC® remediates without you taking actions.
Interoperability
Hope you are not getting locked with your NMS. You should choose a platform rather than a tool. A platform allows other tools to communicate through it. Your NMS may miss out anomaly detections of your business application performance, but another powerful Application Performance Management (APM) may able to help. So the NMS platform should be able to engage the APM strength for a total monitoring management. Grafana is a great example of such a tool.
AgentLess
You do not want to install an NMS agent inside your systems which are 100 miles away. You may lose complete control of the system when the process thrives to secure its necessary computing capacity. Also, a mix of agent-less and agent-based solutions may push you into a corner during the deployment phase, as well as during the maintenance operations. The agent-less solution is always a plus for a few benefits:
- Based on open standards (like SNMP) or embedded OS process (like WMI)
- No additional process inside the OS, saving the precious computing capacity
- Easy to deploy, easy to maintain
- You get millions of documents on Google on the standards, such as SNMP or WMI
Easy-to-Use
Of course, you do not want access multiple applications on multiple tabs on your browser. Do you?
Also, you do want to miss the opportunity to have a common place for the below features:
- Multisite users & roles control
- Geo-structure of all sites and locations
- Accessing a site/network to another site/network through a single click
Hybrid IT Monitoring
Being an enterprise, you may have already adopted cloud-scaled infrastructure and services, like AWS or Microsoft Azure. Though they have their own monitoring & analytics platforms like AWS CloudWatch or Azure Monitor. But hey, don’t you fancy monitoring the cloud infrastructure & services side-by-side of your on-premise infrastructure? Right from the same NMS? Below are a few benefits of having an NMS that supports the hybrid IT:
- AIOps across on-premise and on-cloud IT. You may want to create a service failover case between the local & the cloud server.
- A single place of monitoring, governance, and control
- A single place or reporting
Easy Licensing
Your NMS also should provide a single place for licensing. Instead of puzzling across multiple licensing counts, expiry & renewal dates, invoices, etc – you should focus on a single tool with an easy licensing model.
Conclusion
WatchMyDC® Hyperautomation solution is embedded with an NMS that supports all of the above features and benefits. A solution with a true event-driven architecture also provides a peace-of-mind UI to manage your complex IT operations in the most simplified way.