What is the purpose of computer monitoring?

What is computer monitoring?

The attendance register is also known as computer monitoring. Its aim is to ensure the availability and performance of infrastructures, equipment, software and processes supporting data.

With this monitoring, it is possible to detect any malfunction or risk of malfunction at an early stage. What's more, the company benefits from real-time monitoring of the performance and availability of its Information System. At a glance, it can access information such as storage capacity, update lateness(es), anomalies and more.

In this way, risk anticipation limits the negative impact on the company and its users. Devices are secured and performance optimized.

What are the advantages of monitoring?

• Global control of the company's IT network
  Installing IT monitoring software facilitates the management of a company's IS, by monitoring the computer network 24/7.
• Risk prevention
  Monitoring reveals malfunctions and potential damage in real time. So, before warning thresholds are reached, the IT department can take the best decisions to adapt the capacity of the information system to the company's needs. In particular, it can proactively and rapidly schedule necessary repairs and upgrades to improve IT performance.
• Enhanced IT system security
  Monitoring software identifies failures of key security systems at an early stage. They highlight peaks in activity or unusual workloads that could be indicative ofmalware attacks such as viruses or Trojans.
• Cost savings
  By guaranteeing continuous application performance, monitoring software enables companies to save money by ensuring the reliability of their day-to-day operations.

Monitoring: the key to effective outsourcing

To ensure application performance of its customers' applications, NFrance's outsourcing services includeoutsourcing a in-depth monitoring. Our teams use several monitoring tools, including Centreon, Pingdom, Evertest and Statuscake.

The elements monitored using supervision probes cover a complete perimeter:

• Hardware (temperature, disk status, RAID redundancy)
• System (number of processes, ping, Settings services)
• Software (web server, databases)
• Backups (included in the daily hosting package)
• Updates (systems and packages)

These probes can also be used to detect abnormal infrastructure behavior: for example, malicious cryptographic software will tend to consume huge amounts of processor resources.

Systematic deployment of application probes outside the hosting company's network (Statuscake, Pingdom) enables us to identify any failure that may occur outside the hosting company's infrastructure (e.g. an incident on the interconnection with an operator).

How are alerts generated by monitoring tools managed?

At NFrance, when a critical critical probe is alertedit immediately and automatically calls the on-call alert system, which rapidly mobilizes a technician. The technician intervenes on the server hardware or software to restore the service as quickly as possible, within the contractual terms and conditions. This system guarantees response times and escalations when dealing with an incident that may occur on your platform.

Ensure accurate detection of malfunctions by setting up complete scenarios simulating navigation sessions

Complete scenarios simulating browsing sessions can be implemented with our partner Evertest (authentication, order tunnel for e-commerce, or access to an application's back-office).They enable us to go even further in detecting problems within applications, with the option of consulting a video of the browsing session. They can also be used to analyze in detail the cause of a malfunction or of a response time threshold being exceeded.

Advanced metrological tools can also be deployed (e.g. Grafana, Graylog). They enable you to accurately measure and report on infrastructure activity but also to implement advanced and make precise recommendations for optimizing the systems concerned.

The screen opposite allows you to to visualize a customer incident in the middle of the night: an advanced navigation supervision scenario fails during the authentication phase.

An NFrance on-call technician is immediately alerted and quickly identifies the origin of the failure (thanks to the failed stage). He then proceeds to restore the customer's authentication Directory, without the customer having to intervene or even report the problem. The customer is notified of the incident as soon as it is handled, and may receive an incident report depending on the nature, duration or severity of the failure.

By monitoring and detecting regression, unavailability or component failure at the earliest possible stage, NFrance continuously improves the availability of its customers' applications, enabling them to concentrate on their core business and grow their business with confidence.This enables them to concentrate on their core business and the development of their activity with complete confidence. Damien GUILLEM - Technical Project Manager (and former NFrance customer)

Secure your IT system and optimize its performance by integrating a monitoring service into your outsourcing.
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