You probably came across this article because you want to monitor a large IT or network infrastructure. If so, I am pretty sure you are faced with several challenges.
We at Paessler want to make this an easy and joyful process for you and offer you as much information and decision-making guidance as possible. In the end, you should choose an infrastructure monitoring solution that best fits your individual situation and requirements. And, of course, if you end up choosing one of our products, we'd be even happier.
Let’s have a look at the checklist below and learn 12 essential features to look for in the monitoring solution for your IT infrastructure.
Networks often start small, but grow over time as new systems, functionality, devices, applications, and even new geographic locations are added. The monitoring tool you select must be able to scale along with your network.
In a realistic large-scale scenario, there is usually more than one data center, and often several geographic locations.
Large environments are heterogeneous, with devices and systems from many different vendors. To bring it all into one overview, the monitoring tool must be compatible with as many vendors and manufacturers as possible.
There are many ways to monitor, and a good monitoring tool must provide you with as many options as possible.
You ideally want one tool that can replace multiple monitoring tools.
It’s helpful to be able to clearly designate users to teams and responsibilities, so that each team can be responsible for their own part of the infrastructure.
In a large environment, you need to reduce the number of alerts to a meaningful minimum.
Examples of this include monitoring medical devices in a healthcare environment, machines on a shop floor in manufacturing, or IoT setups.
If you want to get a central overview, you will need to consolidate data from several systems into one central view.
For advanced analytics of monitoring data, it must be possible to forward data to business intelligence applications.
In an enterprise environment, you probably have internal service level agreements that teams need to meet, and external service level agreements with customers or users. These need to be tracked and reported on.
You need to be able to get up and running as quickly as possible, and with a minimum of effort.
Now that you know what a monitoring solution for large IT infrastructures should bring to the table, you might like to learn how to create a successful concept for monitoring your IT infrastructure – regardless of if you want to monitor 50 devices or 5000! Yes? Then check out the article 4 steps to a successful IT infrastructure monitoring concept.
Finally, I want to show you how we can support you with our software. First of all, you can either use PRTG Network Monitor or you can choose the Paessler PRTG Enterprise Monitor. The table below shows how the two products differ:
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PRTG XL |
PRTG Enterprise Monitor |
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The PRTG XL license is a perpetual license. It limits the number of PRTG servers but not the number of sensors.
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PRTG Enterprise Monitor is subscription-based. There is no limitation on the number of PRTG servers; rather, you pay for the sensors you need.
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Here, my colleague Shaun explains the features and benefits of PRTG Enterprise Monitor in an easy-to-understand video.
For more information on how our products solve your challenges, simply contact us. As large monitoring setups require planning, experience and a lot of monitoring know-how, I recommend talking to one of our PRTG experts around the globe.
We have prepared a guide to successful enterprise IT monitoring for you. In it, you will find a lot more information on how to successfully monitor large IT infrastructures. You can get the guide here, or just click on the banner below the article.