It is common to have some internal, often agent-based, tools to monitor your infrastructure. The beauty of a tool like Awakish is that it is indeed external.
Awakish will monitor your business-critical systems from the outside just as your customers do. Your customers will not be happy if the customer facing systems are not accessible over the internet and that’s why testing them from the outside makes sense. Many internally based monitoring tools will show that everything is OK, even when the systems are inaccessible and that create a false sense of confidence that will probably result in delayed efforts when a system faces problems.
Problems that are hard to detect by internal monitoring tools are:
- when certain web services are down,
- when a firewall or router has stopped to transfer traffic correctly,
- when a DDOS Attack is taking place and,
- when there’s an internet outage like when a physical cable has been damaged
For all those scenarios above, you will need an external monitoring tool like Awakish in order to get the whole picture so that you can remain agile and ready to act when needed.
An additional scenario is that a service from a neutral party like Awakish, will help you in discussions on a monthly basis related to how well the Service Level Agreement (SLA) has been met and when problems related to downtime has occurred.
Being able to easily track when downtime has taken place helps when understanding how you can improve the service, regardless of whether your IT is supplied internally or by an outsourced provider.
Finally, being able to monitor external online services from SaaS providers is important as your employees often depends on them (like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics 365 etc) and you might have business-critical systems that are connected to services provided by external providers where data is being exchanged regularly and if something breaks you need to be the first to hear about it.
Regards, Per