What do I need to be able to 'see' in order to manage my IT environment properly?

For over a decade, large companies have had their IT departments using monitoring software to keep watch on their IT systems. I first deployed systems for this purpose in 1999, and it wasn't new technology then.

This monitoring software was not cheap, and the network traffic it generated was expensive. So, either this monitoring stuff was going to be a waste of time and money, or it was going to provide a benefit to the companies that used it.

I'm pleased to say that the latter proved to be true – with the monitoring driving massive benefit to those organisations that set it up well and made good use of the technology.

I'm amazed that 11 years down the track though, many businesses (small and large) still lack basic visibility of their IT environment. This means that businesses fail to predict problems before they happen, and fail to remove them at their root cause.

Over the last few years, technology has emerged that lets any small business gain the advantages of monitoring. With your computers monitored and managed, you'll have visibility of the following factors:

• Server temperatures and fan activity
• Power supplies
• RAID sets (disk pre-failure, loss of redundancy)
• Free disk space
• Use of disk quotas
• Mailbox sizes
• CPU and memory usage
• Backup Success/Failure
• Antivirus software currency
• Security logs (for unauthorised access attempts)
• Network traffic
• Internet connection outages
• Uptime of PCs and servers

Once these factors are being monitored and any changes tracked, it is possible to see where things are going wrong before they have an impact on your systems.

With good solutions, connectivity, and automation, the management of your monitored computers can be done efficiently in a way that drives your business productivity. When things do go wrong, the history recorded by your monitoring tool can also assist in solving the puzzle and lead to a better (and much faster) solution.

If you don't want to run the monitoring tools in house, it is possible to achieve all of this over a cheap internet connection. This means you can have a local support company doing the monitoring for you, and then they respond every time an alert pops up. It's a bit like having your office alarm system going to a security company, so that they can check what is going on if the alarm goes off.

A good support company will have automated systems that capture these alerts, and generate job tickets to ensure a technician is assigned to the job long before it reaches a critical level for your business. This automation will mean you'll never get nasty surprises from your IT system without warning.

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David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.