No one ever thinks that their computer works quickly enough: if it’s not the time it takes to open email attachments, then it’s the speed of internet downloads.
So how can you tell whether complaints are truly justified, and whether your business IT could be working harder? IT monitoring is the process your business needs to undertake, to determine how well your assets and network are performing, and where future investment may be needed.
Establish a baseline
To truly understand how your IT systems are performing, you must first define what ‘normal’ is – known as ‘establishing a baseline’. Factors you need to consider include:
- Standard Internet upload and download speeds
- Local network speeds
- Server memory and processor loads
- Average application load times across each of the company computers
For the most accurate results, these statistics should be collected a few times so that an average level can be calculated for each metric. This then becomes the baseline figure for future comparison.
Regular retesting
Constantly evolving technology brings with it increased resource demands that usually leads to declining time-performance of company IT systems. Your business needs to keep an eye on how much user productivity is affected, ensuring that it doesn’t fall below acceptable standards.
This means routinely checking performance of key systems and infrastructure against your previously established baseline. Tests should be conducted regularly, no less than twice a year so that problems can be identified before productivity drops too far. For the very best results, monitoring should be a continuous process. Once problems are identified, you will know where action needs to be taken.
Targeted investment
With problems and bottlenecks identified, your business knows exactly where to make future investments to improve IT performance. Rather than guessing how best to spend the IT budget, you will have the figures you need to target spending to boost productivity and profits. And you will also be able to prove performance improvements to users and any board or shareholders.
IT monitoring – an expert can save you time and resources
Carrying out baseline testing is both time and resource intensive – and best performed by an IT expert, particularly if you want to implement a program of continuous monitoring. Outsourcing monitoring services to an expert IT consultancy like Complete I.T. allows your business to benefit from expert guidance in terms of improving existing infrastructure performance and how best to invest for future gain.
Contact us today to learn more about IT monitoring and how we can help your business do more.