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Cloud Based Monitoring – the TCO is Compelling

Posted by Rob Risetto on November 22, 2016

These days organisations are more comfortable and adept at deploying critical systems to the Cloud, however, the same support challenges faced in on-premise

environments are now being encountered in the Cloud.One important challenge that needs to be met in the Cloud is how to maximise system uptime and avoid the unexpected at the same time reducing support costs.

As per on-premise, this challenge can only be overcome by implementing a comprehensive monitoring and alerting solution, without it SLAs can’t be met and downtime is assured.

The challenge becomes exponentially larger when the monitoring and alerting solution must span on-premise and Cloud implementations over geographically dispersed data centres, that may not have direct connectivity to the on-premise network.   Managing and supporting multiple monitoring systems adds substantial costs in terms of separate infrastructure, software licensing, upgrades, training and alert management (no single view of the all critical systems).

DBInsight, as a provider of SQL Server managed services, faced the extreme end of this challenge, i.e. many clients with a mixture of on-premise, colocation and cloud based servers.

The licensing costs, setup effort, and ongoing support overhead of the traditional on-premise monitoring solutions (e.g. SCOM, Idera, Dell’s Spotlight on SQL Server) have made them impractical for the hybrid and multi data centre environments.

What was required was a monitoring solution that could span disparate, non-connected data centres or computer rooms (domain/network agnostic), a monitoring solution with a low total cost of ownership but with a flexible and comprehensive monitoring capability.

After hundreds of hours evaluating features and costing options for numerous monitoring software vendors, DBInsight settled on the cloud based monitoring solution from LogicMonitor. DBInsight, using the extensibility features of the LogicMonitor, built a highly customised and comprehensive SQL Server monitoring solution (SQLRDS Monitor www.sqlrds.com ), essentially a “DBA in a Box” solution.

Consider the following TCO items built into the low monthly subscription price for LogicMonitor, which is inherent in DBInsight’s SQLRDS Monitor :-

  1. All monitoring infrastructure
  2. OS/Database licensing for monitoring infrastructure
  3. No end of period licensing sure-ups for monitored devices, this is all managed by the provider’s billing engine.
  4. SMS alert gateway
  5. High Availability built-in into the monitoring solution.
  6. Scalability built into the monitoring solution. Capacity is managed by the monitoring provider.
  7. Upgrades are automatic and can be scheduled by the operator.
  8. Single pane view of all monitor servers, grouped in server hierarchies.
  9. Training is required for just one monitoring solution.
  10. Monitoring rules/thresholds are predefined and auto discovered. The end user does not need to be a monitoring guru and spend hours configuring the monitoring rules.
  11. Monitoring is deployed within minutes, no major rollouts of infrastructure or network is required. The deployment process is simple and minimal in effort.
  12. Security is baked into the monitoring solution, firewall/proxy friendly, encrypted data transfer, encrypted server information, high grade secured data centre running the central monitoring database. Security Role based access to lock down users to specific servers or groups of servers.
  13. Web Portal to visualise Alerts, Dashboards, Performance data and Reports.
  14. Free Mobile application to view alerts anywhere

The bottom line is, the total cost of ownership for the base LogicMonitor offering is compelling and cannot be matched by any traditional monitoring providers.

To see an online demo of SQLRDS Monitor (www.sqlrds.com) email sqlrds@dbinsight.com.au or call us on 1300 914 460.

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