Monitoring internal applications presents unique challenges. These applications, which may be crucial for employee productivity, secure data access, and internal workflows, don’t interact with the public internet, making traditional monitoring tools and strategies less effective. However, keeping these applications stable and performant is critical, as any downtime can affect entire teams or departments.
In this blog post, we’ll explore why monitoring internal applications is essential, go over a strategy to create an effective internal monitoring plan, and cover some best practices for monitoring behind your firewall.
Why Monitor Internal Applications?
Internal applications such as CRM systems, internal messaging platforms, and ERP tools are essential to a company’s daily operations. They keep employees connected, streamline tasks, and hold critical business data. If an internal app experiences downtime or performance issues, it can quickly disrupt productivity, communication, or even key business processes.
Regular monitoring of these applications can help:
- Ensure Reliability: With continuous monitoring, IT teams can prevent and resolve issues before they impact users.
- Optimize Performance: Monitoring helps identify slowdowns and areas for improvement, which is essential for applications that handle complex tasks.
- Strengthen Security: Some monitoring tools can help detect unusual behaviors or anomalies, offering a layer of security for applications with sensitive data.
With these benefits in mind, let’s look at the key components of an effective internal monitoring strategy.
Internal Monitoring Strategy
Before you decide on how to do the internal monitoring or what tools you should choose, preparing an internal monitoring strategy is a good idea for better understanding and taking full advantage of the monitoring. You also want to streamline your internal monitoring with consumer application monitoring so that you have the full picture of what’s going on in your infrastructure as a whole. Here are few tips for internal monitoring strategy:
- Decide on which applications to monitor. Your organization may typically have ERP, CRM, accounting and payroll portal, HR portal, help desk, collaboration tools, communications tools so on, and so forth. Some of them don’t really need 24/7 monitoring, although a regular system check is necessary, while some of them will need continuous monitoring, for example, like your IT help desk. Identify and prioritize the applications that are crucial for smooth business operations and need better monitoring.
- Focus on SLA compliance. SLAs negotiation and compliance are at the heart of your IT infrastructure. Not only they provide a sense of trust between you and your business partners/vendors but they also give you a baseline for a robust IT infrastructure. However, to validate and maintain the SLA compliance by IT, you would need to have a way to check if the baseline is met.
- Server Monitoring. Monitor server and system resources to optimize performance and better planning for future usage and budging so that your internal stakeholders have a consistently smooth experience.
- Cross-department Monitoring. Multiple departments may have different portals for their work but they are often integrated into a large system for streamlined data flow. However, latency and uptime need to be monitored to avoid unnecessary bottlenecks and data consistency.
- Monitor third-party APIs and External Websites. Your internal applications might be using some third-party APIs and your internal users also might be using external websites for their work. To ensure productivity and efficiency internal users, monitoring these from inside your firewall enables you to discover issues they might face.
- Monitor from Regional Offices. This must be an integral part of your monitoring strategy if you have regional offices. Your internal applications might perform differently depending on your office locations. Monitoring from one location won’t be enough to cover your base.
In addition to these above-mentioned points, you need to evolve your monitoring strategy as your organization grows, in addition to your infrastructure and employee base.
How to Effectively Monitor Internal Applications
With a solid strategy in place, the next step is implementing effective monitoring practices tailored to internal applications.
1. Use Synthetic Monitoring
Synthetic monitoring simulates user interactions to test an application’s performance continuously. With synthetic monitoring, you can set up regular checks that simulate user requests, response times, and other interactions, helping you detect issues before they impact real users. This approach is particularly useful for internal applications because you can create custom tests that reflect actual workflows. Synthetic monitoring tools can typically be deployed behind your firewall, allowing for secure, in-depth monitoring.
2. Leverage Real-User Monitoring (RUM)
Real-user monitoring captures data from actual users as they interact with the application, providing insights into the real-world experience. While RUM is typically used for external applications, some advanced solutions offer RUM for internal applications if your organization is able to collect the necessary data securely. This can offer valuable insights, especially for applications with a high degree of user interaction.
3. Implement Network Monitoring
Since internal applications rely on your organization’s network, monitoring network health is critical. Poor network performance can lead to latency or connectivity issues, affecting application performance. Keep an eye on:
- Bandwidth Usage: Ensures there’s enough capacity for peak usage times.
- Packet Loss: High levels of packet loss can cause delays in data transfer.
- Latency Across Different Network Segments: Internal applications often span different parts of your network, so monitoring latency between segments can help identify bottlenecks.
4. Choose the Right Monitoring Tool
Not all monitoring tools are designed to work within a firewall environment. For example, Dotcom-Monitor offers robust options for internal application monitoring, including synthetic testing and alerting capabilities tailored for behind-the-firewall applications. With Dotcom-Monitor, you can set up checks to measure response times, simulate user interactions, and monitor resource utilization, all while keeping data secure within your network. This ensures you can identify and address performance issues quickly and stay on top of critical KPIs.
5. Set Up Regular Health Checks
Implement regular health checks for core application functions. For example, if you’re monitoring an internal billing system, create tests that check essential functions like login, data retrieval, and transaction processing. These regular checks can alert you to issues as soon as they arise, helping you prevent potential disruptions.
6. Use Automation for Faster Response
Automation can significantly streamline your monitoring process. By setting up automatic responses to certain alerts (like restarting a service if resource utilization exceeds a threshold), you can reduce the time to resolution. Many monitoring tools offer integrations with automation platforms, allowing you to automate routine tasks.
Conclusion: Monitoring Internal Applications
Monitoring internal applications requires a targeted approach with the right tools, metrics, and strategies to ensure seamless performance behind your firewall. By setting a solid internal monitoring strategy and using tools like Dotcom-Monitor for continuous, synthetic monitoring, you’ll be well-equipped to catch performance issues early, respond proactively, and maintain high availability for your critical internal systems.
As you implement these strategies, remember that monitoring is an ongoing process to keep your applications performant and reliable so that it will benefit everyone in your organization, from IT teams to end users.
Learn more about monitoring internal applications with Dotcom-Monitor Private Agents or try the full Dotcom-Monitor platform with a free trial.
