A few things to know about MaaS

We have already written about PaaS, DBaaS, SaaS and others * aaS. We did not cover all the terms then, but this was not the goal. There is another important term that I would like to clarify. This is a MaaS (Monitoring-as-a-service).

This is an important service, which over time will only become more relevant. It is important for a large number of companies that need to monitor their equipment and software constantly. Perhaps not in 24/7 mode, but quite often. And then here is what can happen (we are faced with this, so we share the painful ones, so to speak).

For example, you have a network infrastructure whose work you want to monitor. You start looking for a program or service that will help in this task, and find them. You install, and everything starts working (immediately or after small dances with a tambourine). All is well.
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But there is also some kind of software product whose work must be monitored. Repeat the previous steps, all is well. Then it becomes necessary to monitor the operation of user devices. We repeat the steps over and over.

Before you realize this, you have a whole bunch of programs or monitoring services that you need to follow. Each service works fine, but they all do not interact with each other or do it at a basic level. Each service or program consumes valuable resources. And this is not a bouquet, but a whole field of flowers, which should be followed by the IT department, which, by the way, has other responsibilities.

Employees of this department need to pay money, and considerable. And over time, all of these monitoring services require an increasing number of man-hours. Increased operating costs, work is becoming increasingly difficult. And this is nothing, but something worse could happen - hacking. The IT department, which should prevent hacking attempts, simply spent a lot of time and effort on monitoring the operation of the monitoring services (sorry for tautology) and missed the attack.

Of course, all this happens not always and not everywhere, and the described situation is somewhat exaggerated. But representatives of large and medium-sized companies are probably not familiar with this situation.

Everything can be changed. For this, it is worth trying what was discussed above - MaaS. All individual monitoring services will be assembled into a single whole, a system where everything interacts with everything. And MaaS will help your IT department to perform its direct duties, rather than engage in the maintenance of third-party systems.

Here are a few things you should know about MaaS before you start working with such a system:
MaaS is quite easy to deploy . Of course, the whole system is somewhat more difficult to implement than each of the above-mentioned services or software products. But once this is done, you will get a complete system for monitoring your entire network infrastructure at the corporate level. Experts say that MaaS can be installed and configured in just a day, after which the system will start working.



MaaS can be easily modified. Without MaaS, changing something in monitoring services is not so easy. Having made one change, then it is necessary to ensure that it does not negatively affect the operation of other systems. All this is done entirely by hand or in semi-automatic mode. But with MaaS everything is relatively simple - such changes are implemented in one place, and the system itself adjusts to the current modification.

Such a system is usually a virtual model of the physical network infrastructure. Each device, application, software solution or hardware product is tracked. So the changes made “from above” are then automatically made by the system at all other levels of the infrastructure, including both software and hardware products.

Reporting becomes easier. One of the main problems of working with several monitoring services at the same time is the need to receive reports. Data can be sent automatically, but there are many, and they relate to various sectors and aspects of the network infrastructure.

MaaS gives a report on the work of the entire infrastructure as a whole, and not on its individual sections. Sending reports can be flexibly configured for a specific period of time, with the inclusion of data on different systems. The work of any application or device may be included in the report.

The problem with working with different services is that all of them have a different interface, data is collected and sent differently. And since such services or applications rarely interact with each other (we talked about this above), then working with all this "menagerie" is still a problem that increases as the company's network infrastructure grows.

MaaS companies usually have a lot of experience. Because of this, they know which services or applications need to be monitored in the first place, as well as how and when to collect data about their work. All this can be entrusted to your own IT department, but this entails the problem described at the very beginning.



Support from the side. Using MaaS, you automatically get support from the company that provides this service. All questions and problems regarding monitoring can be solved with this company. And own IT department will be engaged in what and should - projects and tasks of own company, but not monitoring of services and programs of monitoring.

As a conclusion, we can say that any company should monitor the performance of its products. But it is better to delegate monitoring of monitoring services to someone else. Otherwise, the IT department will spend a large amount of time and effort on the work, which is not a priority task.

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