Do companies monitor their IT to check its health and provide early warning of potential system issues?

I’ve spent many years investigating organisations’ IT systems and improving system performance but I’m regularly struck by how few CIOs seem to plan time and resources to do it systematically. Certainly many will use vendors’ monitoring tools, where they are available, for some systems but rarely consistently across the entire landscape.  There was further evidence of the lack of system monitoring with Progress Software’s survey of early warning systems used by IT departments in safety-conscious environments, covered in last week’s Computer Weekly http://tinyurl.com/4sczw4u.

Building an early warning system isn’t an easy task as IT systems become ever more complex; many IT platforms are an amalgam of different vendors’ products anyway, so some kind of cross platform IT monitoring or checking is needed. However, monitoring isn’t just about providing a snapshot of a particular IT component’s status. Carefully designed, it could enable the CIO to give the board early warning of potential issues across different systems - or help with planning ahead. It could be focused and used by the board to help IT better meet different departments’ objectives as the business’ needs change.

In a world of deadlines and data streams, a system health check could start the process of giving CIOs some more long-term insights into the technology assets they are responsible for.