Anyone working in the IT world knows that there will always be more software solutions on the market than an organization can afford.

In the world of Software-as-a-Service providers (SaaS), which is global in scale, this is truer than ever before. There are numerous solutions for your organization's IT needs, and your organization should use its internal purchasing process to adopt a best-fit solution.

Your final choice is not necessarily the best solution but one that your company can afford or easily integrate with existing systems.

With more business processes being automated each year and managed through cloud providers, we recommend that you're on the lookout for the most pressing SaaS solutions. You don't want to break the bank, but you do want to have a third-party system monitoring all of your applications in the cloud.

We wrote this piece to help you advocate for the best cloud monitoring services.

Two Ways to Look at This IT Expense

You can look at your need for having adequate cloud monitoring services from a third-party provider from two perspectives.

On the one hand, you have consumers, whether they are individuals (B2C) or organizations (B2B) in terms of marketing.

They may consume some or all of your services on the Web, or they may go to the web for support, such as updating billing information or tracking the status of a product delivery. They will get frustrated when your website goes down or runs sluggishly.

Cloud based network monitoring services regulate the performance of all applications that customers see and those that they don't, which helps your company maintain the facade of seamless web services.

On the other hand, you have the needs of your technical team.

They collaborate often through web-based tools and monitor many servers and applications.

These operations may span the globe. Help your IT team use data from a third-party monitoring service to identify problems with servers and web portal performance. This helps them to prioritize their work, especially if their job is keeping all websites operational for the organization. 

The Focus on Overall Productivity

Because companies are increasingly moving into the cloud, they will need better ways to assess the performance of every web-based application.

You won't want your IT people to have to monitor multiple dashboards in order to see how these applications perform.

With third-party monitoring, they can get a snapshot of numerous applications regardless of their location and prioritize server upgrades and maintenance to keep them operational without too much downtime.   

Choosing Cloud-Based Monitoring Raises Questions Like These:

• Is Your Company Covered?
• Have you thought about the solutions that would help IT people do their jobs faster?
• Do you know the status of every web-based application without having to consult multiple systems?
• Do your IT support people know where to go to start working on problems? 

Get the Nuts and Bolts of Web Services Figured Out

There are many more issues to identify besides ensuring that all websites are online and smoothly running all server applications.

Third-party monitoring services can drill down to the level of transactions that users perform on each website around the world (whether these are employees, customers, or business partners).

At the transaction level, for example, your company should know if users have difficulty submitting a web form, processing credit card information to complete their order, or if employees can't save their updates to customer database files.

Knowing when transactions begin to fail or get caught up in the same point in an automated process makes it easier for technicians to solve problems.

They don't need to waste hours searching for problems. They need to drill down and get straight to finding solutions.