Technology and end users have an almost dichotomous relationship; as technology gets more complex, end users expect a more seamless experience. At the same time, end users are also looking for maximized application availability and performance.
How can a federal IT team meet these increasing demands? The answer is monitoring.
Most monitoring instances have been implemented as an afterthought or as a way to solve a single, specific problem. To provide a seamless user experience while
enhancing application performance, federal IT pros must establish monitoring as a core IT function. The key is understanding how to normalize metrics, alerts, and other collected data from different applications and workloads to enable a more efficient approach to troubleshooting, remediation, and optimization.
With this approach, agencies can also benefit from a much more proactive IT management strategy, improved infrastructure performance and security, and reduced costs.
Start With a Modular Platform
Look specifically for a modular platform, one with the ability to add tools seamlessly based on changing needs and capable of growing with your agency. Find a platform designed to simplify integration by providing a common set of services across products, including a unified U/I, customizable dashboards, and intelligent alerts and reports.
Consider Cross-Stack Correlation
Cross-stack correlation is critical for federal IT teams to be able to visualize and correlate data across the entire IT stack. Monitoring networks, systems, virtualization, infrastructure, and storage environments involves collecting and analyzing millions of different metrics; sorting through these disparate data points can be a significant challenge.
Cross-stack data correlation allows you to correlate data across the application delivery stack to compare all collected metrics regardless of their location, whether they’re physical or within the delivery path. You can also overlay different types of metrics and measure different aspects of the infrastructure on a common timeline within a single view.
Filter Out Alert Noise
Filtering out noise through things like machine learning-based anomaly detection speeds up mean time to resolution for a given issue, helping ensure minimal impact to application availability and performance.
Accelerate Troubleshooting With Advanced Reporting Capabilities
Look for a solution capable of accelerating troubleshooting across the entire IT stack by sharing data for contextual visibility and relationship mapping. Consolidated metrics and data within a single view puts disparate information into a meaningful context and provides the mechanism for creating advanced alerts and responses for faster root cause identification and automated resolution.
At the end of the day, the goal of the federal IT pro is to deliver—reliably and consistently—applications and services to end users. To meet this goal, it’s imperative to be able to quickly determine the issue and its solution. Having a platform-based resource providing cross-functional collaboration and correlation as well as advanced reporting capabilities is critical to resolving problems quickly and providing a seamless end-user experience.
Find the full article on our partner Carahsoft’s Community blog. 
