Imagine trying to navigate your way through a maze. It’s full of dead ends and puzzling pathways, and sometimes the paths change too. Where what was once a path, that you took towards the end, is now blocked off. Thus, getting to the exit, or end, is pretty tricky. But it can be done – with dedication, perseverance, and hard work. Now imagine trying to traverse that same maze blindfolded – even dedication and hard work aren’t really going to help you. In fact, it’s now likely an impossible task.

Bring this back to IT, trying to run an IT department, delivering and supporting IT services. To do this without monitoring tools is like getting inside that maze with a blindfold on – you’re essentially making a tough job even tougher. When you can’t see what you’re working with, how can you expect to get on top of issues and to improve performance?

If your IT organization is all too used to hearing about incidents via its customer base, is struggling with root cause analysis and is spending too much time and money on manual support, then the following five reasons as to why you need monitoring tools should be of interest to you.

1) Monitoring tools help to set your IT organization’s performance benchmark

Without a benchmark, how does your IT department know what it’s capable of or whether it’s improving? Quite simply, it doesn’t.

It’s going to be pretty difficult to come up with your IT strategy when you don’t know what your current IT infrastructure can do or how well your department is performing. In my experience, it’s not uncommon for organizations to put together service delivery and support strategies based on best guesses rather than data-driven facts – which can be a dangerous place to be given that best guesses tend to be not that great and you’re likely to be in danger of expecting too much. This can then lead to too much pressure placed on staff, reduced morale when goals can’t be met, budget setbacks, and damaged reputations.

Five reasons why you should be considering monitoring tools. #servicedesk Click To Tweet

Monitoring tools will give you real-time analytics, so you can then get a clear picture of how your applications and infrastructure are working. With this information, you can then create more-appropriate strategies, set realistic goals, understand where improvements need to be made, and track performance over time to see if you’re heading in the right direction.

2) Monitoring tools help to improve your organization’s performance

Monitoring tools are great for showing the status of your IT estate and the health of your organization, but they don’t stop there.

Just because everything is working doesn’t mean that it’s all working as well as it could be. Monitoring tools allow you to understand the ins and outs of your infrastructure, such that you can focus on areas that might be putting the organization at risk.

Then targeting problematic points, and resolving them before incidents occur, will not only improve performance but also save your organization valuable time and money. Plus, of course, monitoring tool data can be used to help identify formal improvement opportunities related to IT services and support.

3) Monitoring tools help to reduce manual effort

Monitoring tools have the capability to not only detect issues, they can automatically fix issues too.

Using rules, and increasingly machine learning techniques, monitoring tools can understand/learn the behavior of your applications and apply a fix – rather than just alerting the service desk – when something isn’t quite right.

They automatically resolve the issue and can even learn from previous issues which means that their resolution gets quicker, and smarter, as time goes on.

Thus, monitoring tools will reduce the manual effort involved in both monitoring and supporting the IT infrastructure. And the removal of these smaller, but frequent, tasks means that your service desk team has more time to concentrate on critical issues.

With the pressures on IT departments to “do more with less,” and to do it better than ever before, proactive support – thanks to monitoring tools – is really the only way to go. #ITSM Click To Tweet

4) Monitoring tools help to set cost expectations

When you employ monitoring tools, you can see how well everything within your IT environment is working. And by monitoring performance you’ll have a much better idea of which elements might need upgrading or even replacing.

Thus, monitoring tools allow you to manage your limited IT budget much more effectively, and helps to prevent unexpected costs from popping up. Additionally, the data provided from monitoring tools are difficult to argue with – which means that it’s more likely that these costs will be approved by “the powers that be” because you have the justification in black and white.

5) Monitoring tools help your IT organization to be proactive

When your monitoring tools are set up to alert you to issues before they impact your customer base, you’ll be able to fix them before they cause you – or your customers – any trouble.

Detecting and fixing issues before they hit has multiple benefits: your organization saves time and money, it prevents system downtime (and the adverse effects, which might be financial at a business level), and it avoids unhappy customers. All of which protects and enhances the reputation of your IT department.

With the pressures on IT departments to “do more with less,” and to do it better than ever before, proactive support – thanks to monitoring tools – is really the only way to go. Monitoring tools ultimately give you the power to relieve your team from menial tasks, save time and money in service operations activities, reduce and even prevent system downtime, and help with your strategy, budgets, and continual improvement plans. And without access to monitoring tools, fully-proactive support will sadly remain a pipe dream for your organization.