The value of IT system monitoring
In today’s complex IT ecosystems, extending equal protection across the entire network is simply not feasible. Instead, organizations need to determine which systems are inherently most critical and prioritize maintaining their operational integrity through effective IT monitoring: tracking performance and activity across servers, applications and other technology components.
By providing real-time data on IT health, IT monitoring tools empower support teams to promptly detect issues that could impair system efficiency, availability, security or compliance. For example, IT monitoring can help organizations proactively pinpoint and mitigate vulnerabilities, as well as identify areas for improvement. A solid monitoring system will establish performance baselines and highlight trends that help with performance optimization and capacity planning.
5 key areas of focus for IT system monitoring
To enhance security, compliance and business continuity, organizations should focus on the following 5 areas in their IT monitoring strategy:
- Email infrastructure
- Virtualization infrastructure
- Active Directory
- Cloud services and infrastructure
- User interactions
Email infrastructure
Email is a cornerstone of business communication — and a top target for cyberattacks. Whether Exchange is based on-premises or in the cloud, it handles huge volumes of sensitive information daily, including not just emails but also data like contacts and calendar entries. A breach can lead to the loss of critical data, and any downtime can compromise internal and external communications, hampering vital business processes. Monitoring tools can also be used to track system metrics such as server uptime, email delivery times, and resource usage, providing insights into potential issues before they escalate into significant problems. This comprehensive approach to monitoring helps maintain the integrity, availability, and reliability of the email infrastructure, which is essential for sustaining smooth business operations and robust security.
Some of the leading email monitoring systems include the following:
ManageEngine Exchange Reporter Plus
ManageEngine Exchange Reporter Plus is a comprehensive management and auditing solution for Microsoft Exchange servers. Designed to help IT administrators and compliance officers monitor, track, and manage their Exchange environment, this Microsoft tool provides deep insights into various aspects of email communication and server performance. Some of its key features include:
- Comprehensive reporting on various aspects of the Exchange environment.
- Insights into email traffic patterns within the organization.
- Email content search across mailboxes.
- Sends real-time alerts for critical activities such as unauthorized access or changes.
- Analyzes and reports on mailbox and folder permissions to ensure appropriate access controls.
Splunk
Splunk is a robust IT monitoring tool renowned for its capability to analyze and visualize machine-generated data from a variety of sources, including email systems. By leveraging Splunk, organizations can significantly enhance their security, performance, and compliance management, making it an essential tool for comprehensive IT oversight. It does this by collecting, indexing, and analyzing the logs generated by email servers, which contain critical data about all email activities. Some of its key features include:
- Data collection and indexing.
- Extensive search capabilities to query large volumes of email.
- Dashboards and visual representations of data.
- Trigger alerts based on specific conditions in the email data.
- Detailed compliance reporting.
Netwrix Auditor for Exchange
With a keen eye on security and compliance, Netwrix Auditor for Exchange dives deep into the intricate layers of Exchange servers, tracking every mailbox access, configuration change, and permission modification, with a keen focus on detecting any suspicious behavior or potential threats. Its comprehensive auditing capabilities provide administrators with complete visibility – and with its user-friendly interface, it offers clear insights into your Exchange environment, helping you identify issues, streamline processes, and ensure compliance effortlessly. Some key features include:
- Comprehensive change auditing.
- Visibility into access permissions to quickly find out who has access to what in your Exchange Online, and how permissions were granted.
- Notifications about suspicious activity, like modifications of access rights, critical configuration changes, and more.
- Collects and analyzes performance metrics such as email delivery times, transaction times, and response times.
- Continuously monitors and analyzes Exchange event logs to identify potential performance issues or errors.
Virtualization infrastructure
Multiple virtual machines (VMs) run on a single physical host and share resources. If one VM consumes excessive resources, it can affect the performance of others and even lead to downtime. Moreover, virtual environments are a tempting target for adversaries, who can use them to move laterally across networks.
Accordingly, vigilant monitoring of the virtualized infrastructure is vital to business operations. Effective monitoring entails managing system health to prevent resource contention and ensure that all VMs have access to the necessary computing power without impeding each other. It also includes monitoring network traffic for activity that could indicate a threat in progress.
Here is a list of IT monitoring tools that can cover virtualization environments:
Veeam ONE
Veeam ONE provides visibility and control over virtualized environments including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Nutanix AHV infrastructures. It offers extensive monitoring capabilities that cover every aspect of a virtual environment, as well as in-depth monitoring across various components, from VMs and hosts to datastores and networking components, which is crucial for enhancing the management of virtual and backup infrastructures. Some of its key features include:
- Provides heatmaps and visual insights into the performance and load of data center resources.
- Integrates with Veeam Backup & Replication to monitor backup activities.
- Offers multi-tenant capabilities.
- Helps predict resource requirements based on current usage trends and growth patterns.
- Delivers diagnostics and automated remediation actions.
New Relic
New Relic provides comprehensive monitoring for virtualization environments, helping organizations to optimize the performance and efficiency of their virtualized infrastructure. It allows IT teams to observe and track the performance and health of physical hosts and the virtual machines (VMs) they run to ensure that organizations can maintain high performance and availability in their virtualization environments. Some of its key features include the following:
- Notifies administrators about issues that could affect the performance of the virtualized infrastructure.
- Integrates with popular virtualization platforms like VMware, Hyper-V, and others.
- Monitors the applications running on virtual machines.
- Offers monitoring capabilities that cover both on-premises and cloud-based virtual machines.
- Provides real-time insights into the virtual environment.
Netwrix Auditor for VMware
Netwrix Auditor for VMware is tailored to the intricate landscape of virtualized environments. This tool tracks and monitors every aspect of VMware vSphere and its components, including standalone ESXi hosts, offering insight into user activity, configuration changes, and data access. Its powerful capabilities empower administrators with complete visibility, ensuring compliance adherence, security posture fortification, and operational efficiency enhancement. Some of the features include:
- Complete visibility into VMware permissions.
- Insights into actions that might threaten your VMware environment, including when it was made, who made it, what was changed, and the before and after values.
- Notifications about critical changes, whether it’s the deletion of a virtual machine or changes to storage resources.
- Security and compliance management via comprehensive reporting on both successful and failed attempts to access your VMware environment.
- Predefined reports and overview dashboards that offer filtering, sorting, exporting, drill-down, and email subscriptions.
Active directory
While cloud identity services such as Entra ID are gaining popularity, Active Directory (AD) remains a primary solution for managing identities and permissions, so AD monitoring is an imperative task. Indeed, organizations need an AD monitoring solution that provides a high level of observability, enabling them to see the granular details of access rights and analyze activity and trends in real time.
These are a few of AD monitoring tools available today:
System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a management tool from Microsoft that offers comprehensive monitoring and management capabilities for IT environments, with a particular strength in managing Active Directory (AD). SCOM actively monitors the health of all critical Active Directory components and tracks key performance indicators, which allows administrators to quickly identify and resolve performance issues to maintain optimal system performance. Some of its key features include:
- Active Directory Health Monitoring.
- SCOM supports automated responses to specific events or conditions.
- Change reporting for Active Directory configurations and security settings.
- Directory Service Access Monitoring.
- Alerts based on specific thresholds or events.
ManageEngine ADAudit Plus
ManageEngine ADAudit Plus is a comprehensive real-time auditing, compliance, and security monitoring software engineered specifically to fortify Windows Active Directory environments. ADAudit Plus offers robust tools that enable organizations to meticulously monitor and audit all changes within their Active Directory (AD) and Windows server environments. It can be an effective way to ensure compliance with multiple regulatory standards such as HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, and more. Here are some of its key features:
- Continuously monitors and records all changes made in AD.
- Detects unusual activities that could indicate a potential security breach.
- Notifies administrators of critical changes or suspicious activities in real time.
- Account Lockout Analyzer tool.
- Monitors and audits changes to file servers.
Netwrix Auditor for Active Directory
Netwrix Auditor for Active Directory provides valuable security insights into the activities within Active Directory and Group Policy. By auditing changes in Active Directory and tracking logons, it helps minimize the potential risks associated with privilege misuse, validates IT compliance efforts, and simplifies the process of resolving issues. Some key features include:
- Comprehensive change auditing to detect all changes in your Active Directory and Group Policy.
- Access control by reporting on every login attempt for critical systems, as well as all ADFS logon attempts, and displaying the full logon history of any user.
- Delegated user access reviews to approve permissions and access requests.
- Monitors the health and status of domain controllers, tracking key metrics like replication health, CPU usage, and memory usage.
- Monitors the uptime of critical AD services to ensure continuous availability and quick recovery from any downtime.
Cloud services and infrastructure
Monitoring cloud environments is crucial for identifying performance bottlenecks in applications and their integrations to mitigate downtime and enhance the user experience. In addition, solid monitoring systems can help organizations control costs, especially with subscription models like pay-as-you-go, by tracking resource utilization and identifying underutilized or unnecessary instances without compromising performance.
Cloud vendors generally provide some monitoring capabilities. Examples include AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor and Google Cloud Operations Suite. Here is a list of third-party cloud infrastructure monitoring solutions available today:
New Relic
New Relic’s application performance monitoring system offers developers and IT operations teams the tools to monitor applications in real-time. It effectively tracks transactions across distributed services and provides comprehensive insights into response times, throughput, error rates, and external dependencies. This functionality is especially beneficial in cloud environments where applications are often spread across multiple services. Some of its key features include:
- Provides real-time insights into the performance of cloud-hosted applications and infrastructure.
- Tracks transactions across distributed services.
- Monitors your infrastructure on public clouds like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform Integration with Cloud Services.
- Offers customizable dashboards.
- Integrates with multiple cloud platforms.
Netwrix 1Secure
Netwrix 1Secure is a sophisticated monitoring tool that safeguards cloud and IT infrastructures, ensuring both efficient operations and improved security. This SaaS-based tool not only secures Microsoft 365 systems, like SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Exchange Online, as well as file servers but also monitors the operational health and system performance of these environments. It provides real-time insights into server uptime, resource utilization, and system performance metrics to help maintain optimal performance and quickly address any issues. Designed to deliver immediate value without the need for complex deployment or extensive training, some of its key features include:
- Immediate alerts about suspicious activities in Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and file servers.
- Simple permission change auditing with all the key facts about changes made to your security groups.
- Tracks the uptime and availability of critical services like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive.
- Comprehensive account monitoring for insights into which accounts have been enabled, disabled, deleted, or locked out, etc.
Dynatrace
Dynatrace provides comprehensive insights into cloud environments, offering full-stack visibility into cloud infrastructure, applications, and services. It automatically discovers all components, from the underlying physical or virtual infrastructure to the application layer, including microservices running in containers. Its AI-driven approach allows Dynatrace to provide a precise, real-time view and proactive problem resolution, significantly reducing the time IT teams spend on troubleshooting. Some of its key features include:
- Provides full-stack visibility into cloud infrastructure, applications, and services.
- Use of AI-Powered Monitoring.
- Seamlessly integrates with major cloud platforms.
- Ability to leverage Performance Metrics and Benchmarking tools.
- Tracks and analyzes user interactions with cloud-hosted applications.
- Anomaly Detection and Root Cause Analysis capabilities.
User interactions
While users are not an IT system, they must be included in your IT system monitoring strategy. Users can accidentally or deliberately delete important data and fall prey to phishing scams. Moreover, adversaries can compromise user accounts and exploit them to commit data theft or sabotage.
Monitoring user activity helps organizations promptly identify potential security threats and respond in time to minimize damage. In addition to enhancing security, activity monitoring is required for compliance with many regulatory standards, which often require detailed logs of user access and other activity. Below is a list of some User Activity monitoring tools you might want to add to your toolkit:
SolarWinds Log & Event Manager
SolarWinds Log & Event Manager is designed to provide real-time event correlation and log management, which helps in monitoring user activities and identifying suspicious behavior. It also includes features for automated response to security incidents, enhancing overall security posture. Some of its features include:
- Real-time event correlation to detect security threats and compliance violations.
- Out of the box pre-built rules and templates.
- Forensic capabilities that allow for deep analysis of historical data.
- Automated response to USB device insertion events.
- Extensive reporting capabilities.
Netwrix Auditor
Netwrix Auditor provides user behavior analysis and risk mitigation in hybrid IT environments, focusing on security and compliance across various systems such as Windows File Servers, SharePoint, SharePoint Online and Teams. From tracking logons to monitoring file access and configuration changes, this tool empowers organizations to maintain control and security. It is designed to help organizations protect sensitive data, detect insider threats, and streamline compliance processes. Here’s a quick look at Netwrix Auditor and its key features:
- Comprehensive risk assessment to mitigate data and infrastructure security gaps.
- User access reviews.
- Detects anomalies in user behavior or system operations, facilitating early threat detection and mitigation.
- Out-of-the-box change, access, and configuration reporting.
- Google-like search capabilities to find the answers you need, like access events for a user or all activity related to a certain sensitive file.
Varonis DataAdvantage
Varonis DatAdvantage monitors user activity to safeguard sensitive unstructured data across file servers, emails, cloud environments, and more. By continuously tracking how data is accessed and used, Varonis provides organizations with critical insights into user behaviors, access patterns, and potential security vulnerabilities. With its advanced analytics and pattern recognition, Varonis DatAdvantage not only identifies unusual user actions but also contextualizes them within the broader scope of user behavior and corporate policies. Below is a list of its features:
- Provides deep insights into data permissions and access structures.
- Generates real-time alerts on suspicious activities and policy violations.
- Automated Data Discovery and Classification capabilities.
- Predefined reports for leading compliance requirements.
- Conducts extensive audit trails for all file activities.
Choosing the right IT monitoring tools
Selecting the appropriate IT system monitoring solutions is critical for overseeing these five critical areas within your IT ecosystem. IT monitoring tools need to provide continuous data collection and analysis, as well as a robust alerting system to help ensure that issues are promptly addressed. Consolidating IT system monitoring into a single solution provides a ton of advantages for organizations as it offers a centralized platform to improve visibility, reduce complexity, and increase scalability.
Netwrix Auditor is equipped with a suite of powerful tools tailored to the intricate demands of modern IT environments. The solutions provide powerful visibility, control, and security across critical systems such as Active Directory, Exchange, VMware, and more. Its robust capabilities for continuous data collection, real-time monitoring, and detailed auditing empower organizations to detect and respond to threats swiftly, ensuring operational continuity and regulatory compliance.
