by Greg Shields

IT monitoring. It’s a term that creates plenty of confusion in IT circles. “Monitoring? You mean, like PerfMon?” Or, “Monitoring? You mean checking my Windows event logs every so often? That’s what we use for monitoring.”

For many of us in IT, monitoring our servers is a task that happens only at the highest of levels: Did a server just go down, and, if so, did my pager go off?

The central problem with IT monitoring is that it can be done at so many different levels in our IT infrastructures. Yes, you can turn on PerfMon and get a glimpse at % Processor Time for a physical server or Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor for a virtual one. You can sift through your event logs and see that Exchange 2010 is dropping an Event ID 7024, noting that “The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service terminated unexpectedly.”

But do these two locations for information really help you? Can you dissect an Exchange performance problem by looking at its event log entries? Probably not. The same holds true with performance metrics. Even with the most powerful of PerfMon counters, if you don’t know how to read them, you won’t gleam much from their data. Making this situation even more challenging, many problems with complex applications like Exchange, SharePoint, or SQL Server require looking at sets of counters to fully understand their behaviors. If you can’t combine different counters to create a more-holistic view of behaviors, you can’t know what’s really going on.

These situations lead to IT monitoring’s second problem: Most IT professionals don’t use it. Today’s monitoring solutions are powerful, exceptionally powerful. With the right monitoring in place, your Exchange or SQL Server problem can be quickly identified through automated solutions. Those solutions can not only alert you to the fact that a problem is occurring but also suggest solutions that directly resolve it.

Thus, the technology that enables IT monitoring encompasses a set of solutions that you should already have in place today. If you don’t, don’t fret. You’re not alone. Most IT shops today still don’t have comprehensive monitoring in place. Or, they’re relying exclusively on in-box Microsoft solutions like the event log and PerfMon tools mentioned earlier.

Your first step in embracing monitoring is to really understand where it fits into your environment. With the right technologies, you can look at system performance across every server, all under a single pane of glass. You can review event log data from multiple machines, aligning the behaviors of every computer by time to see how they interact.

But that’s only the start. Deep application monitoring involves the installation of agents onto your Exchange Server, SQL Server, or any supported server, for an intensive analysis of the under-the-covers behaviors of those technologies.

Network and transaction monitoring extends your vision outside the individual machine, taking into account the individual transactions that occur between your servers. You can learn a lot by watching how two servers talk to each other. With the right monitors here, you’ll quickly come to know why your Web site slows when its database runs a particular stored procedure.

Finally are the cutting-edge solutions that are revolutionizing today’s comprehensive monitoring. End User Experience (EUE) monitoring and service-centric monitoring encompass an “everything to everyone” mentality to monitoring that ensures every part of your environment is watched—even down to the actions of the individual user.

To help you unravel the differences between each of these types of solutions, take a look through this series’ seven articles. In each, you’ll learn a bit more about how each monitoring fits into your big picture. You’ll also discover a few companies in each space whose products can help you get started.

About the Author

Greg Shields is an independent author, speaker, and IT consultant, as well as a Partner and Principal Technologist with Concentrated Technology. With 15 years in information technology, Greg has developed extensive experience in systems administration, engineering, and architecture specializing in Microsoft OS, remote application, systems management, and virtualization technologies. He is a Contributing Editor and columnist for TechNet Magazine and Redmond Magazine, and serves as the Series Editor for Realtime Publishers, the world’s leading provider of high-quality content for the IT market. Greg is a highly sought-after and top-ranked speaker for both live and recorded events, and is seen regularly at conferences like TechMentor Events, Microsoft Tech Ed, VMworld, and more. He is a multiple recipient of Microsoft “Most Valuable Professional” award.