We, as a developer of IT monitoring software are aware of all the great benefits that can be achieved with a competent IT monitoring solution that is set up properly and that is used pro actively.

The proactive approach to Monitoring

The IT monitoring system can be seen as a tool that can be used pro actively on a daily basis to identify small interruptions and problems in the network and its services to to fix them before the problems grow and start to effect the business operations.

The monitoring as insurance approach

Or, it can be seen as an insurance, something that is good to have when something has already happened to minimize the damages. The monitoring system let you see what went wrong and where to quickly fix the problem.

How monitoring can save you money

Both these approaches can and most likely will help your company save money. The proactive approach is by far the best, since it not only make sure your IT systems and its services are running smoothly, not causing costly down time and in worst case, loss if income due to system failure. How much money that is saved can be hard to measure, since the huge saving potential is in the big events that never happened due to the proactive work. The best way is to measure before and after scenarios when implementing monitoring and a proactive strategy, that will show the aggregated savings of all the small disruptions and time saved from the often costly “running around putting out fires” approach many IT departments are stuck in today.

The insurance approach will also save you money since when the problem occurs it can be identified and located and fixed much faster than before proper monitoring was in place. Its often relatively easy to determine how much it costs per hour a service, IT system or network is down.

The key to get a good return on investment (ROI) for the IT monitoring system is of course to combine the two approaches, working pro actively to increase system uptime and quality of services and use the forensic features to quickly solve upcoming issues.

An successful example

Arla Foods is a global dairy company and a cooperative association owned by approximately 7,200 Swedish and Danish dairy farmers. They produce in 13 countries, have sales offices in a further 20 countries and consist of more than 16,000 employees.

Arla identified the need of a monitoring system, trying to prevent costly production downtime in one of their production facilities. For Arla Foods, every production stop means high costs, in a worst case scenario 300 people will have to stop working.

op5 Monitor provides a central overview for a production- and a warehouse facility: ie switches, firewalls, wireless access points, servers, a plc control system and nearly 700 services. op5 Monitor also takes into consideration the internal dependency of different components, which to a great degree speeds up the troubleshooting and improves the decision documentation when prioritizing necessary actions for operational stops.

Arla Foods can easily calculate their savings:

”The time savings provided by op5 Monitor in the event of system downtime and other incidents is invaluable. Just one incident is enough to cover the entire investment in our new monitoring platform”, said Gustaf Winther.

Read the full success story of how Arla managed to get a fast return on their investment in IT monitoring.