Features that every business needs for infrastructure monitoring

Today’s IT environments are increasingly complex, with hybrid clouds, multivendor storage systems, and distributed applications. IT teams need robust infrastructure monitoring solutions to track disparate workloads and maintain optimal performance. The right monitoring tool and features can mean the difference between proactive issue resolution and reactive firefighting, saving organizations time and money.

Infrastructure monitoring has evolved from simple server health checks to comprehensive observability platforms that provide deep insights across your entire technology stack, giving you a single view of your heterogenous workloads. These tools help storage administrators and IT engineers identify bottlenecks, predict capacity needs, and resolve issues before they affect business operations.

Infrastructure monitoring tools are essential for managing the increasingly complex environments that organizations depend on. This increased complexity makes the need for real-time visibility, advanced analytics, and seamless tool integration more critical than ever.

This blog post explores the capabilities to consider when assessing what’s essential for monitoring your infrastructure. Focusing on key features and types of infrastructure monitoring tools, we’ll discuss what key capabilities are required for effective, scalable infrastructure monitoring.

When it comes to infrastructure monitoring, there’s a huge difference between basic monitoring and enterprise-grade infrastructure observability. Effective tools should provide these core capabilities:

Unified visibility across your entire environment is essential. Rather than managing multiple point solutions, the best infrastructure monitoring tools provide a single-pane-of-glass view. This approach eliminates blind spots and reduces the difficulty of managing complex hybrid environments.

Real-time analytics and alerting enable proactive issue resolution. Advanced tools use machine learning to establish baselines, detect anomalies, and predict potential problems before they cause outages. This predictive capability is crucial for maintaining high availability in mission-critical environments.

Seamless integration ensures your monitoring solution works with the tech stack you already have in place, including hardware and software.

Heterogenous infrastructure monitoring tools

NetApp^® Data Infrastructure Insights stands out as the most comprehensive solution for infrastructure monitoring, particularly for organizations managing complex, heterogeneous environments. Data Infrastructure Insights unified visibility eliminates the tool sprawl that many organizations struggle with, providing a single interface for monitoring infrastructure from multiple vendors, including the major hyperscalers.

Data Infrastructure Insights leverages AI to deliver predictive analytics that help you stay ahead of potential issues. The platform's correlation analysis capabilities enable rapid root cause identification, significantly reducing mean time to resolution. This ability is particularly valuable when dealing with complex interdependencies across your infrastructure stack.

One of the strongest advantages of Data Infrastructure Insights is capacity planning insights. Rather than relying on reactive provisioning, it provides accurate forecasting that helps optimize resource allocation and avoid unnecessary infrastructure costs.

Traditional monitoring alternatives: Point solutions
 
Point solutions are tools designed to address specific problems or tasks. In infrastructure monitoring functions, this may look like server or network monitoring, application performance monitoring, or log monitoring, among others. Because they are specialized, point solutions often offer highly targeted features that can deliver good results for that specific purpose.

However, these tools often operate in isolation; they are not designed to integrate seamlessly with other systems or tools or to provide unified visibility. As a result, implementing point solutions can require significant effort to connect them with existing infrastructure or other tools. Without proper integration, they can create data silos that hinder the ability to perform environment correlation analysis, making it difficult to obtain insights that require data from multiple sources.
 
Several traditional monitoring tools exist, but they often fall short in providing the comprehensive observability that modern infrastructure demands. Many legacy solutions focus on specific infrastructure components rather than on delivering end-to-end visibility, which is difficult to scale.

Open source alternatives

Open source tooling is an option for teams that are looking to streamline operations, reduce costs, and take advantage of the global open-source community. Open source solutions can excel in areas such as detecting system outages, tracking resource utilization, and identifying performance bottlenecks. However, these solutions are usually focused on specific workflows and don’t handle complex hybrid environments as well as a more traditional, commercially available infrastructure monitoring tool. Open source users also run the risk of projects being deprioritized or losing support.
 
Also, although open source alternatives can offer cost advantages, they often require substantial internal resources for deployment, customization, and ongoing maintenance. Proper configuration, regular updates, and expertise in managing open source software are essential to realizing their full potential. For smaller teams or organizations with limited IT resources, these solutions may actually increase operational complexity rather than reduce it.

When evaluating infrastructure monitoring solutions, consider these factors to guide your decision-making process:

Scalability is crucial as your infrastructure grows and evolves. The monitoring solution should accommodate increasing data volumes and new infrastructure components without requiring significant architectural changes.

Integration capabilities determine how well the tool will work within your existing technology ecosystem. Look for solutions that offer robust APIs and prebuilt connectors for your current infrastructure components. This integration reduces implementation time and ensures comprehensive coverage from day one.

Security and compliance features are increasingly important as regulatory requirements become more stringent. Your monitoring solution should provide audit trails, access controls, and compliance reporting capabilities that align with your organization's security and governance policies.

Consider the total cost of ownership, which includes not just licensing fees but also implementation, training, and ongoing operational costs. Solutions that require extensive customization or specialized expertise may have hidden costs that impact your budget.

Selecting the right infrastructure monitoring tool requires careful evaluation of your specific requirements, existing infrastructure, and organizational goals. Although many solutions claim to provide comprehensive monitoring, few deliver the complete unified visibility and advanced analytics necessary for modern IT environments to scale and keep up with customer and business demands.

Data Infrastructure Insights is the state-of-the-art infrastructure monitoring tool standard, offering the comprehensive capabilities that storage administrators and IT engineers need to gain complete visibility and reduce operational complexity. Its combination of unified visibility, predictive analytics, and heterogeneous support makes it the clear choice for organizations that are serious about infrastructure monitoring and observability.

To explore how NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights can transform your infrastructure monitoring capabilities, schedule a demonstration today.