Beyond the box: Custom monitoring with Site24x7 plugin integrations
Organizations today navigate through a myriad of popular and unique applications, intricate systems, and custom services in their IT infrastructure. Each of these elements plays a crucial role, offering insights into the organization's performance or indicating potential issues on the horizon early. This visibility enables organizations to maintain system functionality and ensure uninterrupted operations.
To provide these seamless services, organizations continuously strive to extract deeper insights from their operations. As a result, the demand for monitoring tools that go beyond conventional means intensifies to include requirements for insights from bespoke and custom services and systems that make an organization tick—from the status of local backup tools and software updates to the performance counters of critical applications, and more.
While off-the-shelf solutions offer a broad overview, they often fall short when it comes to providing the granularity required for organization-specific key performance indicators (KPIs) or enhancing operational efficiency. And as a result, the need for customized monitoring becomes imperative.
Introducing Site24x7's custom plugin integrations
Site24x7's custom plugin integrations help you pull data from all the unique and bespoke systems, services, and applications your organization uses and view them all in Site24x7 under a single pane of glass. You can build these integrations yourself, in the form of scripts, so that your systems can talk and send custom metrics to Site24x7 for you to view, analyze, and act upon.
Identifying opportunities: Where and when to implement
Custom monitoring steps in where standard tools fall short, addressing the unique demands of your organization's systems, applications, or processes.
Here are some scenarios where you can look to implement custom monitoring with Site24x7's plugins:
Tailored application insights: If your organization relies on custom or industry-specific applications, plugins can be fine-tuned to keep a close eye on their performance and critical metrics with custom indicators, or on user insights like user interactions and response times.
Custom processes: Custom plugin integrations can facilitate the monitoring of internal processes and scheduled tasks, such as deployment pipelines, batch processing, local backups, or specialized workflows, ensuring efficiency in operations and in identifying potential bottlenecks.
IoT and hardware data: Analyzing data from hardware and IoT devices becomes easier with custom monitoring, aiding in predictive maintenance and device uptime.
Business and compliance metrics: You can use custom plugins to pull essential metrics from business KPIs and workflows, like order processing, customer interactions, and supply chain logistics, providing invaluable insights to decision-makers. You can also use plugins for specific compliance requirements to track specific data points to ensure adherence to regulations, especially if you're in industries like healthcare or finance.
How do custom plugin integrations work?
Site24x7's custom plugins use scripts to collect metrics from diverse sources in your infrastructure. You can write custom scripts using Python or Shell for Linux servers and PowerShell, Batch, VB, or DLL for Windows. These scripts define the logic for collecting relevant custom metrics or monitoring specific aspects of your environment. One of the requirements when writing a script is that the output should be in JSON format. If you're unsure how to go about it, we've got you covered with some templates for each to get you started.
Once the script is created, it needs to be placed in the Site24x7 plugins folder within your server. The custom plugins are then executed at predefined intervals by Site24x7, and the JSON output is collected as per the defined logic in the script.
Turn data into actionable insights
Site24x7 provides a centralized location for data analysis, visualization, and reporting for the plugins you create. You can view the data through custom dashboards within the Site24x7 web client and assemble metrics from different parts of your infrastructure. You can also set up predefined thresholds based on the collected data to trigger alerts, allowing you to respond promptly to potential issues, or even self-remediate through IT automation.
Get started
If you're not already using Site24x7, sign up here to start monitoring your custom apps and services.
You can also view this help documentation to learn how Site24x7's plugin integrations work; browse our more than 100 ready-to-install plugins for popular apps, systems, and services; or read our blog on how Site24x7's plugins can supercharge your infrastructure visibility.
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