Whether it be big or small, managing proper diagnostic and monitoring tools is exceptionally crucial for any organization. These tools help your business monitor your IT network, which in turn helps with infrastructure operation optimization, significant and rapid troubleshooting, and avert any potential power outages.
Hence, businesses need to invest in these network monitoring carefully. With the help of Managed IT Services, here are 5 tools you can use to monitor your business IT network.
Practice Visual Documentation for Your Business IT Network
Many small and medium-sized businesses make the error of not documenting the devices and tools that are part of their network infrastructure. Due to this, they face many problems keeping track of the devices and tools added once the business has grown. Along with this issue, new hires take more time to get used to the network due to either outdated manual diagrams and excel sheets.
Here is where a network monitoring software can provide live networking maps that get updated quite quickly and help with training, implementation, and ease of device access.
Remote Administration
The ratio of tech support to people seeking tech-related solutions is never going to be equal. The demand for tech support is high in any modern business, especially for small businesses. Moreover, tech support faces the biggest problem is their reach, which hampers their efficiency to a large extent.
To eliminate this problem, investing in a remote administration and support tool is the best decision. With this tool, tech support becomes much more comfortable and smoother to implement and practice.
Use Monitoring and Alerting Tools for Business IT Network
Any tech-related issue or interruption means two things. First, tech support has to drop their current task and look after the problem, and second some part of the business is unable to work. Tech dependent companies face this issue a lot regularly. It is a loss of the business’s time and efficiency.
Hence, with the help of an alert tool that can monitor pinpointing the cause of any outage becomes easy. In some cases, the device can warn you about potential outages. It also is capable of assigning the right team and resources to the cause of the outage.
Implement Enhanced Network Security
In today’s technology and the internet-dependent business world, the most crucial investment has to be network security. Data breaches cost a lot to any business, mostly small and medium businesses. These businesses are more likely to be targeted by hackers due to a lack of network security tools.
According to the study, businesses, on average, lose around 4 million USD due to data breaches. For some companies, this amount of loss can ruin their entire economic stance at once. So as a business, investing in useful network security tools is a must.
Using the Help Desk Tool
Having a help desk tool can be helpful for both small, medium, and large companies. Moreover, it will prove its worth as an investment sooner than you would expect. The tool helps in rounding up and following all the issues or demands that come from the user-end.
However, its functionalities do not end there; this tool's most significant upside for small and medium businesses is the data it provides. It helps the IT organization to understand the mindset of the user better and expedite workflow inside the IT department.
Configuration of Your Business IT Network and Devices
Configuring and reconfiguration is an important activity that must happen periodically. It ensures that all the network devices, software, and hardware are running smoothly and efficiently. Tools designed for this particular job may not seem important at first for small or medium businesses.
However, once your company starts growing, these tools become more of a necessity. They monitor the software versions, replace old devices to improve compatibility with efficiency, and repair damaged or defective hardware. All these become easier to track and are less time consuming with the help of configuration tools.
Analyzing Performance and Accounting
For any company, administration and controlling of the network and coordinating with the service provider regarding the system's performance and efficiency is necessary. Your network should work at its full capacity with minimal wastage. For this, you need to invest in network-specific tools.
These tools help you monitor and accumulate data regarding packet loss, utilization, response time, throughput, etc. They also allow you to keep an account and track the service provider's billing and charge-back on your network.
Monitoring and Managing Syslog
One can argue that Syslog management tools are a far better investment than visual documentation tools. The data records that Syslog produces tells about the status of your computing situation, along with what is working fine and what is not.
Syslog is a tool that works in the background; there is also no need to have someone assigned for its review and administration. However, in any failure or system, malfunction Syslog will act as a forensic tool. That can help you pinpoint the fault with the help of a quick scan.
Administration of Storage and Data Management
Despite what type of company or business you are running, the IT department always works with and is dependent on data. Every tool mentioned above generates data that needs to be read and interpreted by the IT department. Management and storage of all the generated information is a crucial part of your business.
However, despite having professionals look after the data, its reading and management are quite a hectic process. Hence, if the amount of generated data is becoming out of hand, it may be time for you to think about investing in data management and storing tools. They help in storage and monitor your data to produce a neat report that makes the complicated data bunch easy to understand.
Prepare and Draft for Future
Always be prepared for the business’s future growth and make sure it can accommodate all the improvements and changes that need implementation. One of the biggest mistakes IT businesses make is not keeping an account for growth. They start making basic mistakes while trying to accommodate improvement and changes to the company.
Hence, make sure you look at each of the tools mentioned above and plan accordingly to monitor your business’s IT network successfully.
