InsightIQ Blog

Relax! We're watching for you.

Sep 25 2009

When it comes to deciding between implementing a CRM solution in-house or partnering with a provider for delivery, you'll want to be confident about the availability of your application and have a robust monitoring process. At CSG's Quaero, monitoring is an integral component of the Operations processes and is standard across all clients.

When it comes to "What" and "How" to monitor, things can be daunting. Consider these four categories to simplify the process:

Infrastructure gear Monitoring: Covers the devices that control the follow of network traffic to, from, and within the data center (e.g., routers, firewalls,DNS, etc. )
Server level Monitoring: This category includes operating systems, event logs, Windows services, disk space utilization, memory and CPU utilization.
Application Monitoring: This layer includes application services, applications event log, application URLs, etc. Many marketing applications and Business Intelligence tools can be monitored if configured properly.
Solution Monitoring: (aka transactional monitoring with event correlation) Solution monitoring provides a dashboard view displaying the overall health of the solution, with the ability to quickly assess individual component. It provides greater flexibility to identify and troubleshoot issues quickly by Operations staff.

Notification goes hand-in-hand with monitoring. Email escalations, text paging, auto-ticketing creation, and live console event management are four common methods of notification. However, filtering out erroneous events so you can focus on the relevant ones can be tricky. False alarms are distracting and can cause staff to miss real alarms. Hands-on review of monitor-triggered events during a testing phase is key.

One common mistake in implementing a monitoring solution is to focus exclusively on monitoring behind the firewall; it's equally important to have an external agent to monitor firewall outside the network as well. This multi-zone monitoring approach better tests the data path, and monitors the user experience more holistically.

All that said, rest assured that CSG's Quaero hosted CRM solutions are fully monitored. We want to make sure you don't wake in middle of the night worrying about your systems; we're always watching for you.

This article is filed under:

View more Blog Posts

View Entire Team Provided By

Ashwini Nayak
Manager, Hosted Operations

Ashwin leads Operations team that delivers solution support to all hosted clients in Marketing database, Campaign management and Business Intelligence application areas.