Advantages of server support and monitoring

Advantages of server support and monitoring include the following aspects:
* lower IT operating costs
* increased productivity
* revenue protection
* customer retention
* improved quality of life
* capacity planning
* service level agreement (SLA) compliance
One of the primary objectives of any should be to reduce downtime. This would include obvious actions such as immediately responding to an IT enterprise function that failed instead of waiting until the failure became visible to users. It would also include watching for problem symptoms and reporting/correcting them before they turn in to outages. Because a professionally run NOC has extensive monitoring tools that provide deep visibility into the equipment, the NOC can frequently help systems and network administrators troubleshoot problems, thus significantly reducing the mean time to repair a problem. In some cases, the NOC can even restore service without bothering the systems administrator if this is the way the NOC - IT relationship is structured.
Monitoring will help develop knowledge about common problems that can be leveraged to harden the IT environment overall.
Lower IT operating costs
The cost for even brief computer service outages can easily turn to a huge waist money. At that rate, if the NOC prevents even one service outage a year, it has paid for itself and then some. In fact, monitoring service provide can't produce hight quality services if it does not care about saving customers money.
Increased productivity
A NOC should be taking care of the day to day problems and issues that come up with the IT enterprise gear. This will free up IT administrators to do the actual engineering work that they are being paid to do. This might include projects such as environment hardening, implementing "best practices", upgrade and capacity planning and other much more productive and interesting activities instead of mostly dealing with fire fighting.
Revenue protection
Monitoring enterprise servers allows time to notice the critical situation and to avoid outages, which is directly related to revenue generation. But revenue isn't only lost when a service goes down. Customers will go elsewhere if the service is slow or unreliable.
Customer retention
Many customers don't leave because of one particular bad experience. Many go to the competition because of chronic unreliability or poor overall performance. Therefore it is important in the shortest time to solve not only the major problems. For example, some minor 10 minute DNS outage may seem trivial to you but it could just be the straw that broke the customer's back.
Monitoring will allow IT organizations to "keep score" on how well they are doing in delivering key services to users and customers, and in doing so will gain confidence and credibility with them.
Improved quality of life
Most of systems administrators know that it's no fun being in a room full of managers listening to complaints about how somebody allowed such-and-such a failure to happen. Or coming to work only to find a queue of angry users outside the office wanting to complain about the latest disaster that's going to consume the better part of day to resolve. At the very least, a NOC should be catching the vast majority of these high visibility events and arranging for rapid service restoration. But another very important quality of life issue revolves around the dreaded "on call" pager rotation duty. This is partly because systems administrator get tons of false alarms at all hours of the day and night that they have to interrupt their lives to deal with. It also has to do with the fact that the "lucky" person holding the pager gets alarms on every problem in the network, not just those having to do with equipment that he is responsible for. With a professional NOC in place, false alarms go to almost zero.
Capacity planning
With professional grade monitoring tools, the NOC can be a huge help when doing capacity planning. The NOC will have long since baselined all of the equipment and if resource consumption is increasing they can easily plot when increased capacity will need to be put in place.
Service level agreement (SLA) compliance
Monitoring allows IT organizations to check service availability in real time, examine past service availability data and use that information to meet the service level it has guaranteed to users of the applications.

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