The days of having to house all of your data in-house are over, with the rise of the cloud and the widespread availability of affordable, effective third party server solutions making it cheaper and simpler to keep information externally.
This might make you think that there is also less need to keep tabs on how data is being used and what factors are impacting performance from moment to moment, when in reality it has never been more important to monitor data.
If you are looking to optimize all things data-related, here are a few handy hints on how to achieve this ASAP.
Choose the right software tools
There are a range of software solutions that are designed to help you overcome such limitations and streamline the way you wrangle storage more efficiently. Monitoring external servers is something you can do manually, although this is both a labor-intensive and technically complex process that will monopolize a lot of your time.
The best tools will not only be able to track the day to day state of play with your remote resources, but also operate effectively across whatever other platforms and server hardware setups you run.
For example, this tool is suited to monitoring SQL Server ecosystems to help troubleshoot issues, minimize costly downtime and ideally allow you to drive down the overall expenses generated by your infrastructure.
Schedule monitoring sessions
It is one thing to put the tools in place to monitor data in external servers, but unless you actively make use of them, your investment will be going to waste.
Modern software should provide automated alerts to draw your attention to complications that arise and are in need of your input, which is clearly a positive feature. However, you should also get used to performing regular proactive monitoring and maintenance, as this will get you in the habit of pinpointing small issues before they get bigger, and also help you to develop better overall administrative skills in a server context.
Consider all the possibilities
When you are monitoring data that is stored externally, it can be tempting to focus in on a handful of diagnoses when troubles with performance occur, or simply to blame any third parties that are responsible for providing some aspect of the service.
Unfortunately there are always a lot of aspects to consider and so you need to be prepared to expand your monitoring gaze as wide as possible to catch the culprits.
In short, you need to consider how resources are being used and what part they have to play in giving you access to data, not just within the server infrastructure itself, but also at every point on the journey from the server to the device that is using the data.
Everything from storage capacity, memory availability and CPU core count to network latency, traffic and security measures can determine how quickly data gets from A to B, so the best administrators will not jump to conclusions and instead use all of the monitoring capabilities at their disposal to unpick issues.