Getting started with SaaS based Monitoring

What is SaaS

SaaS is an abbreviation of Software-as-a-service. It is a software distribution model, wherein the software providers host applications and makes them available over the internet to the consumers. SaaS constitutes cloud computing, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). In simple words, this breakthrough in technology would take away the need for organizations to install, run and maintain applications on their computers or datacentre. Leading organizations provide SaaS services for their products to the end customers. The market analyst believes that going forward, with considerable developments in Cloud space would eventually drive lots of business to adopt SaaS-based products & services. Let’s see how SaaS has evolved in several types of technical monitoring space, for organizations to quench their needs in that arena.

Technical Monitoring

In general, there are two basic approaches when it comes to monitoring, which is passive & active monitoring. The former captures all user interactions to a website or client interactions to a server and can be used for application performance monitoring, error detection, and website analytics while the latter methodology simulates user actions and actively monitors the availability, accuracy, and performance of your essential business applications.

More commonly known are the following types of professional monitoring solutions:

1. Real User Monitoring (RUM)

2. Synthetic Monitoring (Proactive Monitoring)

3. Infrastructure Monitoring

Synthetic Monitoring is an active monitoring approach wherein scripts simulate the entire step by step user interaction. This includes keying in data, button clicks, handling depended on flows across different types of browser. As it simulates typical user behavior, only business-critical functions are monitored for its Availability, Accuracy & Performance. Automated alerting and probing of user actions 24 / 7 provides the necessary proactivity, which makes synthetic monitoring a fundamental element of each monitoring stack.

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a Passive monitoring approach that records all the user interactions and traces all corresponding technical requests. This is a real-time application monitoring and is often used on development, integration, and production stages. It delivers excellent insights, provides transparency and helps all teams involved in the value stream to identify the root-cause of issues very quickly.

Infrastructure Monitoring is a passive monitoring approach which is focused on standard system resource metrics such as CPU utilization, Memory utilization, Network utilization, and other technical metrics. Most of the metrics related to these components are monitored at certain frequencies and laid out for analysis. Thresholds and alerts can be configured to convey abnormal behaviors.

SaaS for Technical Monitoring

There is a huge need for IT services to be available, accurate and with the best performance. All organizations want to monitor their offerings on production to ensure reliability and performance which led to the evolution of active & passive monitoring tools, with standard on-premise implementation. As monitoring requires simulators to mimic key business scenarios, there exists a need to align it across various customer locations (geographically distributed), infrastructures for storing monitoring stats, a centric platform to visualize the monitoring stats, setting thresholds, configuring alerts and eventually their maintenance, are all the huge hassle, that comes along. With the above said, monitoring became costly, time-consuming & resource intense activity.

Thanks to the SaaS technologies and essential inventions in cloud space engineering, that has delivered a best and unique amalgamation of SaaS and Monitoring tools. This nurtured blend has brought down all the implementation difficulties on the Monitoring space. Now SaaS-based Monitoring is the talk of the town.

Smooth Migration

SaaS-based Monitoring tools are the best solution for new, as well as existing on-premise product clients. The primary reasons are ease of implementation, flexibility and centralized control. SaaS-based Monitoring tools provide robust recording options to script key business scenarios, autocorrelation features, synthetic data parametrization facilities, different stimulation frequencies, and globally distributed execution locations.

Forget the pain of integrating a new product into your data center and entirely focus on what counts most for your value stream. Monitoring must be lightweight and not another product integration adventure. This is precisely what SaaS-based monitoring delivers. You register and after a few clicks you are ready to configure your first monitoring use cases. From multi-user actions to API checks, the bandwidth is enormous. Link your monitoring scenarios with your preferred ticketing solution, receive scheduled reports and get automated alerts in case your business applications are down, or preconfigured thresholds have been exceeded.

No matter if your application under monitoring is exposed to the internet or not. Private agent facilities allow you to execute monitoring checks from within your data center. You have all the benefits of a SaaS-based platform and apply them to external and internal hosted applications and enjoy the freedom of using these services instead of maintaining your monitoring infrastructure.

Benefits of adopting a SaaS based Monitoring Solution

IT leaders agree that SaaS-based solutions outweigh locally deployed solutions for several reasons.

1. Implementation: Dramatically faster to implement. Easy to move the platform. Product tested & maintained by the vendor.

2. Customization: As a product, customization can be achieved through configurations, and in fact, the product support is swift when compared to an on-premise solution.

3. Flexible Payments: It’s not required to purchase licenses upfront. It works on a pay-as-you-go model. Transitioning the cost to a recurring operating expense, allows the company to predict their budgets easily. So, what we pay is what we want to utilize. Monthly, half-yearly Annual subscription packages for monitoring are all available.

4. Support, Maintenance & Upgrades: This is an area wherein SaaS-based Monitoring tools scores the fullest. As a centric platform product & services, support comes along. Patches & Upgrades are handled on the platform by an experienced product support personnel. In a nutshell, it is a part of the offerings.

5. Scalability: SaaS-based Monitoring solutions needs scalability concerning infra, monitoring sensors, variable stats to monitor, services monitoring, user simulation locations. This is again a big plus here. Just with a few clicks, we are good to go.

6. Security & Regulatory Compliance: As a platform provided by high-end vendors, security & compliance are taken care of. With robust security measure, monitoring & standards, SaaS platforms are highly secured.

7. Accessibility: Again, a significant advantage of using SaaS-based Monitoring platform is that, as everything resides centrally, we can access it over the internet practically from anywhere.

8. Cost: Last, but not least, major driving factor for companies to adopt any Monitoring tools. If we consider an Initial cost, Implementation cost factor, Infrastructure /Maintenance cost & YoY Maintenance cost, SaaS-based Monitoring tools are far less when compared to the on-Premise tools.

Adopting a SaaS-based Monitoring platform is highly beneficial and a forward-thinking decision. Twenty years ago, organizations exposed their services to the internet, and the same development is now lined up as a significant shift to the cloud. Don’t wait and see how your competitors realize huge benefits by utilizing SaaS-based services such as cloud-based performance and availability monitoring. Be proactive and start your journey to the cloud.

Keep doing the right things! Happy Monitoring!