Understanding the Importance of HA and DR for your Monitoring Environment

High availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) are now commonplace in most IT environments. Which aspects of the IT environment are included in HA and DR, though, vary from one organization to another. For example, an organization may value a particular database or web app as business critical, while an archive system could tolerate downtime for days. But what about the systems that monitor your IT environment?

System and application monitoring is critical to the success of a well-run IT department. During a failure or disaster, it is even more vital. While it may not be immediately intuitive, irregular operations are the time when having your monitoring system online is one of the most important components for proper recovery.

Quickly recovering business systems and customer-facing systems is top-of-mind for IT administrators, but simply bringing systems back online doesn’t mean they’re functioning optimally or normally. Complex business services that include multiple applications and processes can be even more difficult to verify a full recovery. Recovery time can be reduced by hours or even days with a monitoring solution that includes a business service tool that can verify and validate the uptime of the system as a whole, including each individual component, without manual review. But none of this is possible if your monitoring solution is one more system that’s offline.

It’s important that your enterprise monitoring solution provides for both HA and DR. High availability means that minor failures or individual server failures won’t take your monitoring system offline. Typically, there’s a system with additional capacity that has been configured to resume the duties of monitoring within seconds or minutes of the primary system failure. Opsview Monitor has this capability as one of its value-added premium features.

Diagram showing how Opsview HA works 

Disaster recovery for your monitoring solution is just as important as high availability. DR for monitoring provides an off-site system that is ready to resume monitoring duties. The service checks and business continuity database data are already in sync and readily available to the secondary system in the secondary location.

During irregular operations, administrators need information, and they need it fast. They need a system that can visually represent their environment, identify the systems that are still offline, and notify them of recoveries and additional failures ongoing.

If your monitoring system isn’t configured for high availability and disaster recovery, contact Opsview today. Monitoring is about more than business as usual, and Opsview is ready for both day-to-day operations as well as times when things may not go as planned.