In this special guest feature, Adrian Phillips who leads product marketing for the Infrastructure Monitoring solutions at Dynatrace, believes there’s too much at stake to allow an oversight to result in a security breach or downtime. In this article, you’ll discover 10 tips to ensure your infrastructure monitoring is effective. Adrian’s passion is helping customers transform the way they work using data, AI, and cloud-based software. He holds a degree in journalism, and loves being with his family, or competing in disc golf tournaments, when he’s home in Raleigh, NC.

Few DevOps teams can afford to neglect a performance issue or security breach that can tarnish an organization’s reputation. Nothing illustrates that fact more clearly than the emergence of the Log4Shell vulnerability earlier this year.  

Meanwhile, in an era of big data, multicloud infrastructure, and digital transformation, the complexities and demands confronting IT managers have intensified. In recent years, it has become clear that traditional monitoring tools and processes are no longer practical or effective. Many of these tools failed to keep pace with the rapid technological innovations and evolving business practices. To make up for the performance shortfall, organizations found they were continuously adding new tools. Eventually, this led to wasteful tool duplication, also known as tool sprawl.

Infrastructure monitoring is an organization’s central nervous system. The purpose is to collect and analyze data from IT infrastructure, systems, and processes and assess system health. 

Modern problems require modern solutions

If a system performs outside a predefined range, that signals something is wrong and triggers alerts. But, as IT infrastructure becomes more distributed, traditional monitoring tools struggle to keep up. Too often, when it’s time to scale or upgrade, these tools are too plodding and inflexible.  

Additionally, organizations can’t afford to wait for alerts in the event an application component or system fails, especially if they plan to honor end-user service-level agreements. Instead, they must adopt a proactive position and identify and resolve potential infrastructure problems before they affect users. 

To ensure systems, services, databases, and applications are secure and operate reliably, organizations need a harmonious implementation of modern tools and best practices. These include ensuring hardware…