What's the number one pain point keeping IT up at night? Many will say that finding a faster and easier way to diagnose problems in their IT environment is the most pressing problem they face.
"Monitoring IT performance across increasingly complex layers of infrastructure, then gaining visibility of the end-user experience of that performance remains a vexing challenge for enterprise IT," said Dennis Callaghan, Senior Analyst at 451 Research.
Here is a checklist for selecting the right tool:
- Visibility is king. Look for software that gives you visibility across the complex layers of infrastructure so there is deeper performance visibility, which makes it faster and easier to isolate and troubleshoot the root-cause of any degradation of user experience through a single dashboard.
- The system should be intuitive. Find a solution that is intuitive. Today's solutions can provide different stakeholders customized dashboards and drilldowns that offer deeper and broader visibility end-to-end, across every layer and every tier of the service infrastructure.
- One-view dashboards simplify the process: With the one-view dashboards, administrators don't have to keep track of multiple screens or tools. Instead, they have a simplified, aggregated overview of IT services through a single dashboard. Find one view dashboards that are fully customizable to provide custom views for the different stakeholders in an organization. Ideally, service demand, resource consumption and service quality should be presented in the same dashboard so IT managers can make intelligent decisions and pre-empt issues that can impact the user experience.
- A mobile app gives you anywhere access: With a mobile app administrators can track the performance of their key IT services from anywhere and at any time using a mobile and tablet. This is definitely an important feature for the busy IT professional.
- End-user like self-service options: Administrators can configure and publish a console with virtual desktop session usage and performance metrics. With this type of console end-users are empowered, providing them the ability to perform basic self-service diagnosis to determine what may be causing a slowdown during virtual desktop access - e.g., their network connectivity, bandwidth usage within their session, system resources used by the session, etc. This self-service console helps reduce user complaints to the help desk and thereby reduces support costs and enhances IT productivity.
- Streamlining the number of tools used to find the root-cause of problems can not only improve IT productivity and enhance end-user productivity and satisfaction - it also lowers the burden on IT operations budgets.