The nightmare of network downtime: How to find the best monitoring solution for you

Paessler's senior sales manager George Wilson is a key player in building business infrastructure in Asia, Pacific and Japan for the company.

Wilson sheds some light on the company's ever expanding footprint in APAC; channel and partners; and the crucial role Paessler's PRTG network monitoring plays in the transformation of Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) businesses.

One trend Wilson notices in the channel is the integration of Internet of Things (IoT). However, there is a lot of misunderstanding around how IoT systems operate and how businesses can benefit from it.

"Businesses struggle to see where the commercial opportunity is and how they can monetise it. Everybody wants to talk about and has questions about it, but it seems as though they struggle to formulate a concise industry strategy around it," says Wilson.

To overcome these challenges, Wilson says, it all comes down to visibility.

"You have to have a common language and common visibility across the entire hybrid system, then you can start putting in processes to improve the performance of the system and capitalise on features the systems give you.

Paessler provides that. They provide the monitoring. They provide the visibility.

But with Paessler, it's not just about getting your IT working. It's about understanding exactly how well it's working and what areas you can optimise, what costs you can save and what areas you can use for investment.

Wilson expects to see the uptake of interconnected devices grow to a staggering 50 billion by 2020. That's 50 billion devices that will be connected to the internet in some way.

To prepare for this organisations need to know what the status and behaviour of all their devices are at any point in time. The only way to do this is to monitor them.

When it comes to channel partners and resellers, Paessler's standards are high. Aligning themselves with the right distributors is crucial to ensure the company sees a sustainable growth. This is what drew the company to Dicker Data as a distribution partner across ANZ.

"They can provide the economy of scale that most resellers and channel partners want. They have the right customer service levels and they have IT systems to support the operation. They have a big cloud engine that can support customers who want to buy either a perpetual on-premise license or a service solution on a subscription model.

If you're a reseller, this means you get the peace of mind that you're dealing with a world-class center that has a low-cost product. You have access to a tier-1 distributor that can offer you all the commercials that you need to wrap around it so you can repeat transaction as much as you like with as many users as you want.

Suitable for integrators, network service providers, telco's and resellers, Paessler's partnerships with the best distributors bring immense value to the channel.

It doesn't matter what business you're in, Paessler has a feature-rich, reliable, highly-automated and customisable solution for you.

But, why is it so important for businesses to monitor their systems?

It's simple – if the systems don't work, bad things happen to your business.

Imagine if your email servers crash at work and your employees can't communicate, or your ERP system fails and you can't process invoices or take orders.

Essentially, you can't operate.

"You need to be able to monitor your systems efficiently. You must be able to know that everything is working properly, and if something is wrong, you need to know exactly what it is.

"The worst thing that can happen is that there is an error. Maybe the server is down and people inside and outside your organisation are calling you to complain.

"The administrators need to dig in and troubleshoot different things to find out where the error is. But, if you have a good monitoring solution, you will know straight away. You will have one light that goes red on the screen and that sensor is telling you what's gone wrong.

Considering the hours of downtime avoided and how cost effective it is, the question of monitoring your systems is a no brainer. The only question is who do you do it with.

Choosing the right solution for your business can be challenging. Wilson breaks down the key questions you should be asking.

• Is the company well established and can they provide me with the support that I need? Do they have local resources that I can tap into? Do they have a well-established channel that can help me with installation and configuration?
• How hard will it be to deploy and what is the cost? How much risk am I putting my business under by introducing this solution into my environment?
• You need to do your research – how stable and reliable is the product? How many features does the product have and do those features solve the problems that I have? Is the product safe? Has it been hacked and are there any vulnerabilities with the product?

Contact Paessler today to discuss their PRTG network monitoring solution and see if it ticks all your boxes.