Economics and Infrastructure Monitoring: Why Netreo is the Right Choice Right Now

Is the U.S. economy in a recession? A recent Forbes article demonstrates how illusive that answer can be. By the general definition that two consecutive quarters of negative gross domestic product (GDP) equals a recession, the US entered a recession in the summer of 2022.

However, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which defines U.S. business cycles, uses a different definition. The organization recognizes a recession as a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months. By this definition, we were not in a recession in the summer of 2022.

Finally, Tim Holland, chief investment officer at Orion Advisor Solutions, has his own take:

“We have a hard time believing the economy is in recession today, given a strong labor market and corporate earnings growth. We also remind ourselves that recessions are uncommon, as our economy was in recession just 8% of the time over the past 30 years.”

Is the U. S. economy experiencing inflation? The Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to combat inflation, so that answer is definitely yes.

Uncertainty Breeds Caution

So, what’s the connection between economics and infrastructure monitoring? More specifically, how does Netreo fit in? While it may be surprising to some, the two go hand-in-hand.

Unstable economics breed caution. Whether a recession or inflation, companies tend to tighten budgets and look for ways to save money in unstable economies. These savings can come from a wide range of different sources, but normally include some standard consequences:

• Layoffs / Downsizing – companies tend to become leaner during a recession, relying on fewer people to do the same work
• Hiring Freezes – companies try to squeeze more from their existing employee base without adding headcount, especially during inflation, when the general cost of labor increases
• Tool Consolidation – IT organizations have a broad range of tools to do their jobs. IT teams at typical organizations use from around 10 to quite literally hundreds of tools. This points to available savings by consolidating from multiple tools and vendors to fewer

Where does Netreo fit into this? Let’s look at each point mentioned above individually to see exactly how economics and infrastructure monitoring with Netreo relate.

Layoffs / Downsizing

When organizations shrink their workforce, it is rarely accompanied by a related reduction in workload. Instead, organizations expect employees to become more productive. IT teams are all too familiar with the marching orders, “do more with less” and that’s where Netreo can help. Netreo is designed to facilitate increased productivity for IT teams through automation, simplified infrastructure management and reduced administrative overhead:

• Automated device on-boarding and configuration significantly reduces administrative overhead. Instead of manually adding devices to your monitoring tool, Netreo enables IT teams to focus on other ways to improve productivity
• One-click upgrades similarly reduce the overhead of standard maintenance, patches and upgrades. Whether you deploy Netreo as a SaaS solution or an on-premises appliance, you need only one-click to ensure Microsoft Windows Servers, Microsoft SQL Servers and other resources are up to date, running the latest security patches, etc. Less admin burden means more time for IT teams to focus on ensuring your infrastructure is performing at its peak
• Advanced incident management reduces things like false-positives and redundant alerts. When your staff is confident that only meaningful alerts reach the correct teams, MTTR is reduced and alert-fatigue becomes obsolete
• Strategic deployment of AIOps: Autopilot allows Netreo to self-tune itself, minimizing the time administrators spend dealing with configurations and settings to optimize infrastructure performance

Hiring Freezes

While the end results are very similar to Layoffs, Hiring Freezes often come without downsizing operations. Netreo has even more features for improving IT team productivity that can help under both circumstances:

• Turnkey installation dramatically improves time-to-value with many customers up and running in hours instead of weeks (or longer). Dashboards and reports are much easier and faster to create, requiring no scripting, SQL or code knowledge. Users don’t need to know Netreo to use it, which helps businesses do more while spending less
• Rules-based administration dramatically reduces admin overhead. Netreo leverages cascading templates and auto-configuration rules that enable the rapid scaling of your monitoring environment, without increasing the admin load on your IT team
• Businesses are considerably more efficient when operating with timely, accurate and complete information. By consolidating the metrics that matter from across your entire infrastructure, Netreo delivers a single source of truth on IT health and performance
• With support services and advanced features included with every Netreo solution, businesses don’t have to choose which features to purchase or when to seek help from Netreo experts. Netreo also comes in on-premises and SaaS deployment options, giving customers the choices they want and the capabilities they need

Tool Consolidation

While survey information varies, organizations in general have far more tools than they need. According to Gartner, 36% of organizations have more than 30 monitoring tools. A certain number of tools may be necessary for exclusive needs, but overlap between tool functionality most certainly exists. Leveraging Netreo to consolidate multiple monitoring tools creates a single source of truth on your infrastructure, which:

• Promotes collaboration by reducing duplicate efforts and finger-pointing. Netreo enables staff from different departments to understand what is happening across the IT landscape. Instead of having the network and infrastructure teams fighting over who is responsible for an issue, the cause of an issue is obvious and MTTR reduced
• Improves data-driven decision making, and ensures your environment is operating at its peak. By eliminating guesswork and operating with comprehensive data on your environment, your IT team and infrastructure will operate more efficiently and save time, effort and money
• Increases service level performance and reduces outages. Teams and businesses operate more efficiently when making decisions based on hard data. And when you make it easier to reach service level objectives, outages go down and service level performance goes up. All this translates into happier customers and end-users, less stressed employees and a better bottom line

And What About Today’s Economy?

So, economics and infrastructure monitoring are related. But why wait to consider consolidating tools and upgrading your monitoring solution? Making the decision to simplify how you manage your IT infrastructure will improve the efficiency of your IT organization, make the IT department a little bit less of a cost center and raise customer satisfaction – all of which improve your bottom line. There’s really no reason to wait to schedule your Netreo demo today.