network monitoring
A NUMBERS GAME
Dirk Paessler of Paessler argues the case for networking monitoring.
‘J
ust give me the
numbers’ is something
data centre managers
might dread hearing;
being asked to define
the value of what you do when your
work underpins almost everything
the company does can be a real
headache. The fact is that there are
a vast number of soft costs that can
only be seen in the long run and
can never have a concrete number
attached to them. While data is
helpful, there’s often no simple way to
quantify the return on investment you
get from investing in new technology
– and network monitoring is no
different. Here we attempt to take
a closer look at all the benefits that
give you a more complete picture of
the ROI. It’s a hard exercise, but a
rewarding one for anyone interested
in where the money is going and
where it is being saved.
Hard costs
Naturally, the ‘hard costs’ are easier
to identify than the soft ones. The
licensing and hardware costs,
implementation costs, upgrades
and module costs, and service and
maintenance fees: all these go into
the costs ledger, while the more
incremental costs of additional
modules and add-ons must also
be factored into the long term
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calculation. Nor can you forget the
possibility of future technologies
needing a new monitoring solution.
In the savings column you can
analyse the efficiency benefits for
your IT department. A network
monitoring tool can help you to
quickly and easily determine which
versions of software and hardware
you have and keep yourself
permanently up to date. It can also
help you to work out what technology
you might need (or not need) helping
you to plan more carefully, rather
than spending on unnecessary
tools. Split shifts and ‘on-call’ hours
are eliminated by a comprehensive
monitoring system, which is a 24/7
sentinel for the data centre.
In addition, network monitoring
allows you to do long term data
collection to analyse the utilisation of
hardware and bandwidth, the upshot
of which is that routers, switches,
servers and other hardware can be
optimised to meet exact requirements,
so reducing unnecessary costs. For
example, rather than having a server
running at 10 per cent of capacity,
you may be able to virtualise it to use
more of its available capacity and get
a better utilisation. Or you could do
continuous monitoring of a hard drive
to predict when the capacity of the
drive will be used up, allowing you to
proactively plan for a replacement.
Downtime
The cost of network downtime and
failures is the next factor to consider.
A number of firms have done studies
on the impact of downtime. For
example, in 2014 Gartner estimated
the average costs of network
downtime to be around £3,900 per
minute. But while exact numbers
are elusive, industry experts have
made estimates that convey that
downtime can have huge costs. The
key question is, ‘how much money
per minute does a network failure
cost my company?’ This will depend
on what your company does and
when the outage occurs – an outage
at an online retailer during the preChristmas rush is substantially more
damaging than an outage on a Friday
afternoon in August.
Some other ‘soft’ factors include
things like your shopping site being
unavailable due to a network outage.
How many customers and how much
revenue is lost when customers
aren’t able to make a purchase?
How do they express frustration? Do
they complain on social media? Do
take their business elsewhere? There
is no hard number here, but the
negative impact can have obvious
lasting effects.
There are of course other more
strategic, long term benefits of
network monitoring in the data