Monitoring

An unavoidable part of an IT infrastructure is monitoring. But how important is monitoring. I dont think 80% of the IT firms in India are aware of such an aspect. They are bothered about uptime and only think about when something goes wrong. There is where monitoring becomes proactive.

How much man power is required for monitoring?
Yes we do need manpower to set up a base monitoring for the system and then a single person should be able to take up any alerts that are generated from it.

How much man hour should be spend doing it?
The answer to this should be NIL. Monitoring should not be an overhead for any department. Only when the system state is changed any attention would be required. The monitoring should be automatized in a way that it takes care of your systems and its running processes and also does a auto correction when ever there is a problem.

There are many tools that can help an organisation to achieve this. Nagios is one tool that I support. There are other tools that are built as a wrapper for this making it more powerful that many proprietary softwares. You can integrate your ticketing system as well to it with a little hack.