September 14, 2022

As a software developer, some of the items on your project list would be to build your app or software to be responsive on any device, code that is easy to read and maintain and make your coding easy to work with and not a nightmare to figure it out. Well, with tailwind keeping your code clean and your designs unique is very easy.  

What is tailwind? 

Tailwind is a low-level utility-first CSS framework designed to build unique and simple code through the use of utility classes without having to write any custom CSS or having to leave your HTML. Tailwind’s API is a collection of CSS which is classified into utility classes that are used to control elements and create unique CSS designs.  

Tailwind CSS doesn’t require a base format like the other CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap, where Bootstrap resets and installs its default styles on top of the base, whereas Tailwind strips any existing styling present and gives you a clean base to build upon. With Tailwind, you build your version of components using the utility classes which makes every tailwind project unique, which is one of the advantages of Tailwind, you get full control over each component since you’re the one designing and building each component, unlike Bootstrap where a button component in bootstrap is the same for every project unless you do customize it further.

Advantages of Tailwind  

  • Minimal Custom CSS  

Tailwind is a collection of CSS designed and integrated into utility classes, which you as a software developer can use the utility classes in your coding to easily apply CSS to your project without having to build custom CSS.  

  • Flexibility; Full Control Over CSS 

Tailwind doesn’t preset default styles, rather it gives you complete control over your components. For Example; A Button component in Tailwind isn’t based on a preset or the heading tags aren’t fixed on a default size. This level of flexibility allows you, as the coder, to create unique designs and components without your code getting complex.  

  • Simpler and lighter files  

If you are writing custom CSS for every component and a new feature, you can end up with large and heavy CSS files, which will be problematic for the performance of your application. Using the Tailwind CSS framework you can re-use your styles with utilities such as padding.

When working with duplicated content, for example, a movie directory, you don’t have to repeat the utilities for each movie, rather you can extract your utilities into a component or a template partial and make all your changes in one place, making your code lighter and way easier to edit and maintain.

Using Tailwind to improve your code

You most probably are wondering if you should even be considering the Tailwind framework when there are so many other frameworks out there. Tailwind is a low-level utility framework that gives you unrestricted control over your CSS as a developer, so if you need such flexibility in your software projects, then Tailwind is your option. It is also very lightweight and has its benefits.

In summary, you can apply the Tailwind framework to your React project, Angular project, Vue, Blade, etc… It is highly recommended to install the Tailwind CSS IntelliSense extension when you’re getting started on your Tailwind project. This extension helps you with autocompleting your class names, previewing the complete CSS for a class name and so many other uses which can be a great support for someone just getting started on the framework.

Our team of software developers at MBiz Software, use the tailwind framework in most of their projects to build better, awesome applications. Want to get in touch? Visit MBiz Software here   

September 8, 2022

Work-Life Balance has never been more called for ever since the global-pandemic having driven a drastic change in the work place. Millions of people having to rapidly adapt to work-from-home amidst others losing their jobs during this period, has led to many a employee realizing the importance of mental health brought about by a better work-life balance in the post-pandemic workplace.

Why is Work-Life Balance Important?

As the popular saying goes “A hungry man is an angry man”, the same applies to a mentally and physically burnt-out person. An overly-stressed employee who has not had the chance to unwind at the end of the workday, and is bound to enter the next work day in an equally stressed working capacity.

As you may have very well realized, when you would have started days with a relaxed mind and body, you had the energy and motivation to effectively get your job done and better engage in the workplace, such as being supportive to your coworkers and pitching in helpful recommendations. On the other hand, when you are having a bad day feeling emotionally drained, you tend to be not so productive doing what you do best.

Having an optimal work-life balance is further emphasized when working as a team. Be it physical labor such as building construction teams or an IT team, a mentally and emotionally unavailable team member affects the productivity of the entire team.

How MBiz Emphasizes A Work-Life Balance Amongst Employees

The team at MBiz Software is constantly encouraged to maintain a healthy social life outside of work where one can explore many other hobbies and activities in addition to an employee’s passion for his work and career. In fact, MBiz strongly discourages employee’s to work outside of their work hours.

6 Ways in which MBiz promotes a work-life balance;

  • Remote Work: MBiz empowers their teams by facilitating them to avail the benefits of remote working such as child-care concerns and schedule flexibility, not to mention the savings in commute time and other similar factors.
  • Flexible Schedules: Full-time and Part-time employees have been given the opportunity to have flexible schedules to blend in with the practical constraints faced in their day-to-day life. Employees at MBiz stand to experience a good number of benefits due to a flexible work schedule. 
  • Health Insurance: As an employee-centric organization at its core, providing health insurance to all it’s employees is one such initiative by MBiz Software in ensuring that it’s the well-being of all its employees are prioritized.
  • Regular Meetups & Events: In remote working teams it is important that good communication and cooperation between the team members are highly held-up in order for that team to be productive and successful. All the teams within MBiz have regular casual meetups virtually if not physically, in addition to internal games & friendly competitions in order to drive interactivity among co-workers to better help with mental and emotional stress relief in the workplace.
  • Intermittent Breaks: At any given time during work hours, MBiz encourages its employees to take a break from the screen to refresh and rejuvenate themselves to help with screen time and overall well-being.
  • Health & Well-Being: As important as it is to maintain balanced overall well-being, many people find it difficult to do so due to all sorts of commitments taking up their time and energy. As a responsible employer, MBiz Software provides its employees with financial sponsorship for the employees to indulge in any type of activity that helps improve their health and well-being. 

Teams within MBiz have developed strategies to effectively complete tasks in hand inside of work hours whilst being on schedule with deadlines. It also helps that the team at MBiz is close-knit and communication within teams and also at the organization level is very efficient, thereby all teams are able to work together to achieve organizational goals whilst maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

Having spoken to the employees at MBiz, they appreciate and value the organization’s commitment to employee well-being as opposed to the typical workflow in the IT industry where deadlines have to be met regardless of work hours.

Optimize Your Work-Life Balance

MBiz Software strongly highly encourages a healthy work-life balance to be maintained at all times in order for a live a better fulfilled life.

As many a people have come to realize post-pandemic, maintaining one’s mental health and overall well-being is often underestimated, one of the main factors associated with it being work-life balance.

Here are 25 ways to achieve an optimal work-life balance.

it outsourcing company
August 29, 2022

IT managed services offer businesses an opportunity to focus on their core business functions without worrying about maintaining an IT department or even worrying about their IT needs at all. Outsourcing IT in your organization to a Managed Service Provider (MSP), can reduce your in-house workloads, increase IT efficiency and minimize IT downtimes, through effective IT management by the MSP. Managed IT services can be of various types, from complete IT outsourcing to a hybrid of in-house IT teams and a specialist outsourced IT team, to make up for gaps in existing IT roles and skills within your business’s internal IT team.

What are IT Managed Services?

IT managed services are information and technology services provided by a third-party organization through a contract or subscription basis, to enterprises and businesses, where the IT functions of a business are managed by a third-party IT managed services provider (MSP), also known as an IT outsourcing company. The whole idea behind hiring a managed service provider for your organization is to consign the IT function of your enterprise/business onto a team of IT specialists who could offer a better IT experience based on your organization’s needs.

Benefits of managed IT services:

1) 24/7/365 Support;

IT managed service providers offer round-the-clock service. Say you’re working on that project late into the night, which is due the next day and your server goes down, your internal IT team is long gone for the day and it would be a nightmare to get them back in the office to troubleshoot.

On the other hand, your MSP is just a phone call away from getting your server up and running again. IT managed service providers identify threats beforehand and eliminate threats before they can cause trouble.

2) Minimal Downtime;

IT outsourcing vendors have technological systems and software to effectively monitor and ensure the client has maximum service at all times. One such system is MSP’s analyzing and identifying potential threats to a customer’s IT system, and rectifying them early on, thereby eliminating the possibility of downtime for the customer.

3) Cost Saving;

MSPs have a steady monthly charge in exchange for their IT outsourcing service, although many managed services are tied to varying cloud expenses. All-in-all, this predictability offers better financial planning for your business.

Hiring a managed service provider for your IT function would be cheaper than your business having to find, hire, train and manage an in-house IT team, not to mention the infrastructure needed to achieve the level of services provided by an IT managed service provider.

4) Ability to fill in the skill gap cost-effectively;

Your organization’s internal IT department could be lacking certain skills and talent, which would be otherwise readily available through your IT MSP. Hiring such talent for your business’s IT team could be costly, especially if your organization requires such skills and talent for a short time / for a specific project.

IT managed service providers such as MBiz Software, offer flexible and scalable teams to fit the talent and skill needs of the customer.

5) Streamlined operations

Delegating the responsibility of data, storage, security, monitoring, management, etc… to an MSP, gives better reporting and centralized management of your organization’s IT functions. There wouldn’t be finger-pointing and blame-shifting should a problem arise; your MSP would be solely responsible for monitoring and fixing issues.

What types of managed IT services are available?

It is not uncommon for organizations to utilize MSP services of various types apart from complete outsourcing of their IT department, such as specialized SaaS (Software As A Service) server management & maintenance, NOCaaS (Network Operation Center As A Service), Cybersecurity services, Data Storage Services, VOIP Services, etc…

The old-school model for IT-managed service providers was a break-fix method, where monitoring was performed and the fixing was done when a problem arose. Modern IT MSPs have adopted an improved model of monitoring and management of systems, where systems are monitored, potential threats identified and rectified to eliminate that issues.

Every company’s MSP needs are different. Before you choose an IT managed service provider for your organization/company, you should analyze and identify your IT needs and choose an appropriate IT MSP who can provide you with that service. E.g.; If your organization, as a bank requires an extended team to support the in-house IT Team (without having to commit as an employer), to help with the software development or maintenance of your organization’s banking systems, an IT managed services provider such as MBiz Software would be a good MSP partner for you given MBiz Software’s expertise in the banking industry and the flexibility offered, for you to hire an extended team.

In Summary, IT-managed service providers can be very beneficial for your organization/business, depending on the needs of your business and the availability of quality resources in your organization. IT MSPs can help your business grow with limited resources, especially Fintech and Saas startups.

Want MBiz Software to help you manage your IT? Connect with us for a FREE consultation!

August 9, 2022

Managing a business requires skill and flexibility, to keep functioning with the ups and down’s that one faces daily. What if a business wants to expand and grow its operations; what does it take? With the evolution of technology, businesses can achieve greater reach in all aspects, such as managing core-business processes in real-time, real-time data management, etc…

At a certain point in the growth of a business, it would need to upgrade and improve the systems needed to manage the data generated from the various functions in the business, such as production data, financial data, HR related data. That’s where MIS (Management Information Systems) & ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems come into play. Both MIS & ERP systems are designed to make data management in a business much simpler and more efficient, although both systems are not alike and have core differences.

To understand the difference between MIS (Management Information System) & ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Systems, let’s understand the underlying relationship between these two data management systems.

What is an MIS (Management Information System): 

An MIS is technically a system to collect and store data that can be dated back to the maintenance of financial ledgers in an organization. In today’s technological era, an MIS is a software solution for enterprises, used as a centralized database to store and process all the data from financials, operations, personnel & working processes of a business.

The main role of an MIS system is to collect, process, and store data that can be used for monitoring organizational processes, and forecasting and planning future business processes. An MIS offers better efficiency and increased profitability of certain business functions such as finance, marketing, and manufacturing among other professional business areas.

An MIS system covers a large section of the functionality of an organization, which led to the creation of more niche software solutions such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems, DSS (Decision-making Support Systems) & OAS (Office Automation Platforms) which are used to create reports, analyze data and support organizations in their decision making process through analytical insights.

Advantages of an MIS:

  • Increased productivity – All the data is stored digitally. Time and resources are saved with the lesser paperwork and lack of manual storage & retrieval.
  • Assisted decision making – Inbuilt data processing tools help the decision makers in the organization to make a decision based on real-time data with autogenerated reports and insights.
  • Enhanced Financial Insights – Easily accessible financial data which can be generated at any time to assess feasibility and efficiency.

Disadvantages of an MIS:

  • Expensive to purchase – Typically Management Information Systems can be costly to purchase, both ready-made solutions and custom-made solutions.
  • Requires proper training – Users of the systems need the training to use the system, which can be costly and time-consuming. Untrained staff can lead to inefficiency.
  • Functionality – Ready-made MIS solution could lack critical features which would be necessary for your business or it could have features that are unnecessary to your business. Alternatively, businesses could choose to have custom-built MIS solutions to suit the needs of their organization.

What is an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system?

An ERP system is a business process management solution developed by software developers for enterprise resource planning as part of an MIS system, In short, an ERP System is an extension of an MIS System.

An ERP system allows for real-time resource planning by integrating all the processes of an organization such as finance, purchasing, inventory, planning, marketing, sales, human resource, etc… into a single system thus allowing for accurate real-time data reporting with the free-flow of information within the different departments of an organization. Without an ERP system, each department within an organization would have separate systems configured for the relevant department. ERP systems synchronize the systems of all the departments into a centralized database accessible through a single application without hindering the individual systems of each department.

Enterprise Resource Planning systems have become much more popular than Management Information Systems in SMEs as well as larger enterprises due to the scalability and the centralized database concept which allows for more synchronized communications within the organization. Industries such as retail, wholesale, e-commerce, logistics, supply chain, manufacturing, production, finance, IT, and real estate have been rapidly adapting to the use of ERP systems.

Advantages of an ERP System:

  • Simplified Reporting Process – Built-in templates make it easier to access comprehensive reports of all the functions in an organization.
  • Scalability – ERP solutions can adapt to the growth of a business.
  • Data security – Most of the ERP solutions come with enhanced security in-built into the system, thereby eliminating the need to have additional security measures taken.
  • Easy to implement – ERP solutions have shifted to the cloud. Organization need not have their physical servers and operation centers to maintain ERP solutions.

Disadvantages of ERP:

  • Solutions can be costly – Most ERP solutions are sold as SaaS products, on a subscription basis. Failure to uphold the conditions of the subscription could lead to inaccessibility of the system and direct impact on the operation of a business.
  • Not easy to onboard – Relevant training is required to set up and operate the system for maximum efficiency.
  • Can be expensive to operate – If an enterprise chooses to maintain the system in-house, expensive hardware will be required, such as up-to-spec servers and storage devices. Ensuring maximized up-time and other maintenance of an in-house system could also be costly. Alternatively, a reputed cloud-service provider eliminates such a disadvantage.

Summary

Both MIS (Management Information System) & ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems are information systems used in an organization. MIS is all about collecting, storing, and processing data & information to generate reports whereas ERP systems are aimed at automating business processes whilst managing the resources of the company and allowing the decision-makers in a company to forecast the future of the company.

Should you be wondering which system to implement, it is advisable to first and foremost identify and understand the needs of your organization and then choose a suitable system solution.

MBiz Software has been the IT partner of choice for multiple global brands, empowering businesses with modern technology. We are more than happy to help you find a suitable IT solution to grow your business! Get in touch with us!

software-development-agile
July 5, 2022

From front-end developers to API innovators, today’s advancements in tools, technologies, and the cloud make it an exciting time to be developing software and services. Over the past two years having gone through the rollercoaster of global events, one of the major shifts we’ve come to realize is how reliant we’d become on digital infrastructure, driven by necessity. The system held up admirably, even as the people maintaining it struggled to invent new ways of working.

If you were to ask almost any software developer if the program they just finished developing is good enough, and they will say it could be better, similar to the way a musician will finally just release an album, even though they don’t consider it done.

What Is Agile Software Development?

The Agile software development life cycle is the structured series of stages that a product goes through as it moves from beginning to end. It contains six phases: concept, inception, iteration, release, maintenance, and retirement

How organizations are adopting to the Agile Development Methodology

Since the global pandemic emerged in early 2020, organizations are now aware of the opportunities and challenges ahead and realize being successful in the digital age requires agility in software development and delivery, as well as business strategy and operational executions.

According to a survey conducted by Digital.ai, when respondents were asked “What were the most important reasons for adopting Agile within your team or organization?” The two most urgent reasons for adopting Agile are the speed and flexibility required by working environments that continue to be both unpredictable and volatile. These are closely followed by a continued need to focus on alignment across teams to streamline the software delivery process.

Figure 1: “What were the most important reasons for adopting Agile within your team or organization?” | Digital.ai

Supported by shifts toward value stream management and business agility, survey respondents indicate their organizations are now better able to meet their agile transformation goals based on their continued adoption of agile practices.

A Few Key Benefits Of The Agile Process

Well executed Agile software development methodology helps teams significantly improve the quality of their software at each release. Not only that, it allows teams to adapt to change quickly.

  • Total transparency and involvement of multiple stakeholders;

An agile software development process requires involvement and collaboration which is not found in more traditional methods where each phase often only involves a specific set of individuals with expertise to accomplish the tasks for that phase, which limits transparency.

In Agile, before each sprint, the entire team reviews, validates, and agrees on which user stories to assign to the sprint. The developers, analysts, testers, and product owner work together to accomplish the items assigned to the sprint. The team meets daily to keep everyone on the same page. Throughout the sprint, each team member verifies each feature and works closely with the developers to ensure it meets the customer’s needs.

  • Better control on the overall project;

In the Agile software development process, the product owners are very active participants in every sprint, working together with the other teams to determine what goes into each sprint. This way, there is less of a chance of surprises or unnecessary features making its way into the development process.

  • Greater product quality;

On an Agile project, the team does not attempt to develop all features at once. Instead, the team assigns a smaller subset of features to each sprint. That way, the developers have more time to perfect those items before release.

Working on a product in small incremental releases ensures that each sprint results in a fully tested and working product.

Conclusion; Using The Agile Development Cycle On Your Next Project Might Be Your Better Option

There’s no doubt about it: agile is a powerful and efficient method for software development. It does not simply offer benefits to the development team but also has business advantages to the client.

With the agile software development life cycle model, teams can easily handle many of the typical project pitfalls involving costs, scope, and conflicting schedules in a more controlled way.

By organizing and reinventing activities related to custom software development, agile achieves its many objectives in a leaner, more efficient, and more business-focused manner.

Indubitably, the agile software development cycle is powerful and efficient methodology for both the client and the software development team. The typical project pitfalls such as unexpected costs, scope and conflicting schedules can be managed and controlled to achieves its many objectives in a leaner, more efficient, and more business-focused manner.

April 5, 2022

Edge computing represents the fourth major paradigm shift in modern computing. The mainframes of the 1950s and ’60s were the first, followed by the shift to the client/server model of the ’70s and ’80s, a model that lasted well into the early 2000s. The cloud was the third major shift, a development pioneered by Amazon’s AWS. Now, edge computing has the potential to be as disruptive to how we share information as the cloud was to the client/server model.

Edge Computing is transitioning networks from being primarily data highways back and forth from a central location such as a cloud database, to a visual depiction of a spider’s web of interconnected, intermediate storage and processing devices. Enabling data from connected devices to be processed and analyzed closer to it’s point of origin, in terms of physical distance. Typically on an edge server or gateway located on the ‘edge’ of the network rather than a distant cloud server or corporate data center.

Richard Villars, Vice President, Data Center and Cloud at IDC says that IT at the edge is about the consumption of IT resources in increasingly ‘smart’ edge locations. These are the urban cores, hospitals, factories, transportation hubs, and a wide range of spaces where we all work, play, and live as well as where we all want to use ‘smart’ things to deliver optimal digital experience.

Transforming the healthcare sector?

According to the research article The cutting edge of healthcare: How edge computing will transform medicine‘ By Computerworld, Many health IT Experts predict that the proximity of computing and storage capabilities of Edge Computing, will transform healthcare by delivering near-instantaneous data processing. Edge could support advanced remote-patient monitoring by processing data from medical devices such as blood pressure cuffs and then alerting clinicians to problematic readings. Allowing for real-time management of medical equipment throughout the hospital premises

“Edge is in the early phases of application in healthcare, but it’s something we’re looking at..”

John Henderson, CIO, Children’s Health of Orange County

The healthcare sector which is rapidly adopting to machine learning, AI, Robotics among other technologies, all which requires significant real-time data processing capabilities for effective delivery in a healthcare setting. With Edge Computing, the healthcare sector has a greater potential for better patient-care as healthcare experts say that this proximity of processing power is needed due to the high costs of moving large volumes of data to the cloud, networking limitations, and latency concerns.

Growth in other sectors

According to the Heavy Reading 2022 5G Network Strategies Operator Survey, current edge deployments are being driven by the healthcare, financial services and manufacturing industries. Heavy Reading says the next largest growth segment will be the media and entertainment sector, with 66% of respondents indicating they would deploy 5G edge services to these verticals in the next two years.

As the compiled data illustrates, the initial edge focus for service providers is to lower costs and increase performance. From a financial perspective, the main driver cited by 63% of those surveyed was to reduce bandwidth use and cost, followed by better support for vertical industry applications (46%) and differentiated services versus the competition (43%)

Two key criteria for edge deployments by smaller operators (less than $5bn in annual revenue) were improved resilience and application performance. Respondents cited that both these criteria had the effect of lowering costs and increasing customer satisfaction as service level agreements (SLAs) would be easier to fulfill. 

From a financial perspective, the main driver cited by 63% of those surveyed was to reduce bandwidth use and cost, followed by better support for vertical industry applications (46%) and differentiated services versus the competition (43%)

Larger operators bring focus to differentiated services and applications that would create new revenues. The reason higher significance was communicated compared to smaller operators (68% versus 28%) might be centered in the need to compete not only with other telco service providers, but also hyperscalers. This presents an interesting observation considering that some service providers are looking to partner with hyperscalers to overcome challenges with edge deployment (Redhat Blog, 5G edge and security deployment evolution, trends and insights)

Advantages of Edge Computing:

  1. Real-time data processing & analyzing;
    • Reduced distance between the origin points of data and the data storage (i.e: cloud), reduces the latency between data transfers and enables for real-time data processing.
  2. Lower costs;
    • Infrastructure costs for Edge computing are lower than the costs required for a cloud or data center.
  3. Eliminating the possibility of a single point of failure;
    • By utilizing multiple edge gateways or servers rather than a centralized cloud server or a corporate data center, the potential to lose access to the entire database due to a faulty cloud server is eliminated.

In 2016, Salesforce.com went offline for more than 24 hours due to an outage at Salesforce’s North American 14 site (aka NA14). Clients could not access troves of customer data, from phone numbers to emails, and more — which heavily disrupted business. Thus is the major problem with relying solely on a cloud (CBInsights)

Where Mbiz can help

Edge is the way to go for all businesses as it expands opportunities and migrating towards the use of edge computing is a critical direction for enterprises.

As a Redhat Technology partner in the OpenShift Container Platform, MBiz is your partner for Edge Computing Solutions.

December 1, 2021

It’s vital that a company has well-oiled IT Infrastructure Monitoring software. An IT Infrastructure Monitoring software’s goal is to collect and analyze from the IT infrastructure in order to improve business outcomes and drive value generation for the company. This is an absolutely critical role in the business’s setup. An IT monitoring software may also aid the business in decision making, hence playing a key role in the business’s future.

  • Getting the most out of IT Infrastructure Monitoring Software

In order to make your regular tasks less difficult and more productive, there are a few practices and concepts that you need to keep in mind when monitoring your IT infrastructure. These practices may come in handy whether you need to set up a new monitoring software or simply want to make the most out of the monitoring system you already have.

Following the practices listed below will help you to get the most out of your IT monitoring software.

1. Know everything beforehand – When installing IT monitoring software, it is necessary that the manual documentation is well-read and thoroughly thought through. This may not seem like such a big deal at the moment, but in the future, it is definitely going to play an important role. It is recommended that you question the vendor about every little doubt you have before purchasing your software. This is because it is important that you’ve cleared all the questions you have about the software and that you have a clear answer for any question and that you and your team are prepared for any issue that may arise in the future. Creating a FAQ site is also a good idea, for your team to find answers to common questions. This will also be helpful for any new staff that is recruited along the way.

2. Allow the Monitoring Software to do the heavy lifting for you – If your IT monitoring software is capable of solving problems without the involvement of humans, saves time for everyone and enhances the overall speed and productivity of the IT infrastructure, then let it lift the weight off your shoulders. You can either write a script or a command that will respond automatically when a device fails to work properly, perform a restart command which is quite common, or consider investing in an IT monitoring system that can provide data directly to your ticketing system.

3. Do something different – Many firms try to focus on monitoring the typical switches, routers, servers, websites, and workstations. The obvious ones. But by thinking a little out of the box, you could try and monitor everything from the lights to the refrigerator. That allows you to take full use and get your monitoring software to work to its maximum potential. Here you get the value for your money. This will not just help you to monitor what is happening at this moment, but to get an idea of what may happen in the future. If some sort of issue is set to happen in the future, it will allow you to know about it beforehand and solve it even before it happens.

4. Explain everything to your software – This will allow your IT infrastructure monitoring software to function more intelligently, making your life much easier. Instead of giving your software thousands of things to monitor individually, feed your software with information and plan ahead of time. For example, notify the software that this particular server is located outside of that specific network device, and so on. When you do this, you may reduce the number of alerts and better understand where the problem is if something goes wrong by defining how everything interacts with the software. Another example is if you get an alert regarding a failure in the firewall, and as a result, you cannot reach the server instead of wasting time figuring out what the problem is, you can immediately identify that the problem-causing firewall is sparking the issue.

5. Keep alerts to a minimum – It is important that you keep your alerts to a minimum. Most companies do make the mistake of setting up alerts for everything. The majority of the software sometimes simply utilizes the default settings in their program, which triggers alerts for almost everything. This leads to alert blindness which occurs when your administrators and users are inundated with notifications to the point where nothing becomes important. It’s just like being part of a text chain where people tend to send too many unimportant texts. Due to this, the number of notifications in your phone increases rapidly and you are bound to miss important texts and notifications. So, as mentioned before, it is important to talk to your vendor and get them to guide you to set up your alerts in a way that is useful for your organization.

Following these practices can help you maximize the return on your software investment and leverage it to make more informed business decisions. IT infrastructure monitoring is critical to your organization’s mission, vision and ambition since it allows you to connect data with wider corporate goals and use it to uncover the underlying root cause of problems. We excel at guiding our clientele to make strategic decisions, setting up their monitoring tools, and enhancing their overall performance by integrating world-class software technologies. Our plethora of custom software solutions is uniquely tailored to fit the ever-evolving nature of the digital space. Reach out to our 24/7 support team to start building your own custom solution with cutting-edge technologies.

Learn how we can help you: https://bit.ly/2Xp1pYF

December 1, 2021

A key aspect of your entire monitoring process is Database Monitoring. Database Monitoring refers to the responsibilities that are connected with assessing the operational state of your database. The database management system gathers the information from the database manager, its databases as well as any other connected applications. This information is then used for tasks such as;

  • Forecast hardware requirements based on usage trends.
  • Examine how well specific programs perform.
  • Keeping track of how often indexes and tables are used.
  • Determining the source of the systems poor performance,

Since it plays such a key role, Database monitoring is essential for keeping your database management system’s performance and health in good shape. For this, it is crucial to have powerful Database Monitoring Software. Everything that happens in websites or servers has a big impact on the database performance and therefore it needs to be monitored properly.           

Database Monitoring Software can be agnostic and would be able to monitor anything regardless of whether you switch software or hardware providers, purchase a company or scale up or down. This may seem like a pretty straightforward process. Yet, there are a few crucial factors that need to be considered thoroughly before purchasing the all-important Database Monitoring Software.

  • What to consider before purchasing

When purchasing the software questions such as “What will our storage capacity be in six months? What will index performance look like?”, may come to your mind. It is vital to learn how to use the predictive and capacity planning functions in Database Monitoring Software. Also, predictive technologies are more crucial than ever for knowing what’s going on now, what could become an issue in the future, and how your company can proactively plan for changes.

You may also think about how the software will help you to check on the truth. Well, rather than relying on the vendor’s software reports, database monitoring provides an objective picture of the performance. If you are switching database vendors, this type of verification is quite useful.

Another factor that must be taken into consideration is to check if the software is vendor agnostic. You need to figure out whether your database is capable of handling the transition like acquiring another company or switching technology vendors. For this, what you need to do is to check whether the Database Monitoring Software can monitor any database from any vendor, as well as several databases from different suppliers on the same network. Simply, it must not limit your options.

Last but not least, make sure that this software provides you with up-to-date information to assist you to better comprehend the difficulties, and mitigate any potential problems.

  • Getting more out of database monitoring with Nagios

Database monitoring safeguards your infrastructure’s performance and availability. But there’s always more to it with Nagios XI.

Grouping your databases – Nagios allows you to group your databases to improve intelligence. Here, what you simply do is group similar databases together in order to make your monitoring process easier. For example, if you have more than one database for a particular website, you can group them together as one process which allows you to monitor all of them together. You can further make this process even simpler by adjusting the settings the way you prefer.

Build an extra check on back-ups – Many servers include automatic backups as part of the program, and you should be notified if something goes wrong in the backend. However, this isn’t the case with Nagios. A client may take a long time to discover that they haven’t backed up their data. Therefore, it is vital that you use a third-party monitoring service such as Nagios XI to keep an eye on backups and be alerted immediately if something goes wrong.

Setting up multiple alerts – Other than the standard alerts Nagios allows you to set up alerts for more situations. You can make sure the alerts are flagging things that are especially relevant to your company in addition to the other typical alerts. Nagios allows you to set up alerts so that you are notified if the number of transactions per second unexpectedly increases. Or in another instance, you can set up to get an alert if a query type takes longer than usual so you can figure out what’s causing the delay right away.

Estimate storage requirements and index performance – As mentioned earlier, database monitoring software’s predictive and capacity planning tools are quite handy. Based on current trends, these tools may use up your data and anticipate how utilization will look in the future. This also allows you to take early measures to avoid costly downtime if you know when a database will reach capacity. Storage and space are problems that might strike anyone at any time. Predictive tools can be used to keep track of what’s going on, receive alerts about future troubles, and prevent minor issues from becoming major ones.

Database monitoring may appear to be a little task, however, the impact it has on your entire IT system is quite significant. Therefore, it is vital that you make the most out of this much-improved monitoring software, by keeping track of what is going on in the databases, setting up multiple alerts, and lowering downtime. As important as it is to implement a database monitoring system, it is crucial that it’s carefully integrated and successfully built into an existing environment with minimal impact on ongoing operations. Our team of experts is proficient in integrating the Nagios product suite for seamless transition and implementation. We enable small to large-scale companies and budding entrepreneurs around the globe to efficiently monitor their databases and network by building custom software solutions carefully engineered with top-notch technologies.

Learn how we can help you: https://bit.ly/2Xp1pYF

October 18, 2021

With a majority of the world utilising a great deal of technology to go about their daily activities, it is of utmost importance that their infrastructure and input systems are well-oiled, functional and seamless. Customer retention is heavily dependent on factors such as system downtimes, network connectivity issues, data loss and latency. As such, it is crucial to have a powerful IT monitoring system to ensure an organisation mitigates all risks by taking control of their technology using modern technology enabling early detection of errors and system failures and immediate rectification.

According to a report released by Forbes in 2018, it’s costing businesses over $75 billion a year due to poor customer service which is $13 billion more than it’s previous report released late 2016. This pressurises CEOs of large and small companies to recognise the importance of delivering exceptional experience to its customers. In an inflationary environment and ever-growing digital landscape where customers have the option of switching brands in a matter of clicks, businesses should seek alternative approaches to reduce overhead costs while delivering a seamless customer journey. This is where IT monitoring, otherwise known as Enterprise server and network monitoring, comes into play – implementation of IT monitoring for networks and infrastructure enables an organisation to address system issues and failures immediately thereby, allowing them to reduce downtime and server errors. In the long run, this results in a positive upward trend of customer retention and customer loyalty as systems are continuously tracked and monitored. Simultaneously, this helps a business cut down on overhead costs, maintain efficiency and improve overall time efficiency in four main ways. 

  1. Once an IT monitoring system is in place, it alerts the responsible team of any detected failures thus, it does not require any manual work to trace, track and monitor networks and infrastructure. This reduces the cost of recruitment, skilled labor, paid overtime workers and human error. 
  2. Reduced system downtime is a major plus. Customers do not threaten to fall out if their queries are taken care of immediately or they face absolutely zero downtime. Without an IT monitoring system, the only way a team can be notified is through a customer complaint or a manual check up on the system. As such, proper management of networks can increase loyalty, reduce lead churn rates and increase positive customer reviews that can eventually drive potential leads. 
  3. Attending customer calls can be a great hassle and requires a team of highly-skilled employees who are available for technical support 24×7. However, the implementation of a suitable IT monitoring system enables the engineering teams to tackle an issue in a couple of minutes and doesn’t require a dedicated 24×7 support team resulting in reduced call waiting times, labor costs and unsatisfied customers. 
  4. This also improves resource allocation within the teams — with most companies adapting Agile methodologies, the teams are trained to be cross-functional. On days with high volumes of alerts on system errors, resources can be allocated for technical support and query handling and on other days, they can be allocated to perform other duties within the team. This reduces the need for extensive expansion of teams, increases productivity and contributes to efficient resource allocation. 

All these factors combined, can prevent a business from incurring major losses due to system errors or downtimes by triggering early alerts to relevant teams thereby, mitigating the risk of losing customers. 

A Comprehensive IT Infrastructure Monitoring Software

IT monitoring systems enable companies to monitor their operations, networks, servers as well as their performance. Simply said, it ignites a possibility to improve a company’s overall productivity. Nagios XI— a world renown IT monitoring system, is a certified solution that’s proven to give its users a unique experience. Large scale organisations all over the world trust Nagios XI to reduce their downtime, improve their network performance and solve a multitude of IT problems they come across. Nagios XI offers an array of unique features that enhance the customer journey and enhance overall business performance.

  • Nagios XI is known to have a very powerful monitoring engine known as the Core 4 monitoring engine that speeds up the monitoring systems.
  • It facilitates a fully functional and detailed dashboard enabling users to visualise the monitoring process through a snapshot of the system, detect recurring patterns and analyse data for effective decision making. 
  • A future-proof feature known as “Capacity Planning” enables early discussions on potential upgrades. 
  • Another key feature offered by Nagios XI is a “Configuration Snapshot” allowing users to save their recent configurations and archive them.
  • Nagios supports an advanced user management feature that enables seamless account management, account activation and user assignment in a matter of clicks. It supports role based access control for advanced security. 

5 Key Benefits of Nagios XI

  • The highly powerful GUI of Nagios XI offers its customers the opportunity to customise the layout according to the user’s preference, providing them the flexibility that they require. 
  • Nagios XI also comes with helpful configuration wizards. These configuration wizards guide and help the users in order to make the monitoring process easier and simpler.  Users no longer need to go through or deal with complex monitoring processes. Instead, all they need to do is enter some required information to conduct the monitoring process.
  • Nagios XI offers multi-tenant capabilities that enable admins to customise the software to display information specified for pre-defined roles. 
  • Nagios XI also offers a centralised view of a business process. It provides users with very useful information quickly allowing users to track the entire monitoring process very easily.
  • Nagios XI is known for its user-friendliness and simplicity, allowing admins to train their subordinates to use the system. With the aid of help wizards, the process becomes much easier and allows new joiners or interns to grasp the system functionalities very quickly.

A powerful enterprise network and server monitoring software can solve all your problems for you and reward you with a spiking ROI. Nagios XI provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Hundreds of third-party add-ons provide for monitoring of virtually all in-house applications, services, and systems. As your trusted technology partner, we enable you to deliver excellence and quality by integrating powerful Nagios solutions to our custom software solutions built with extreme care and attention to detail.

October 18, 2021

Back in the day, implementing new servers meant a hefty investment in data centers, hardware and additional technical management efforts. In the ever-evolving cloud-based enterprise computing ecosystem, the tech companies can access additional servers to reduce overhead costs. A multitude of cloud-based service providers such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) enable businesses to expand their networking, storage and servers with maximized cost efficiency. 

With the transformation from legacy practices to cloud-focused enterprise computing systems, security is a pressing concern and each additional network or cloud-based application sparks a potential cyber threat. In order to maintain the security of the data on cloud-based applications, additional networks and servers, proper monitoring practices require to be in place. It is also important that organizations continuously monitor the performance of servers, ensure availability of servers and maintain high-security. Reducing unplanned downtime can play a vital role in giving customers an optimized user experience and enhance customer retention rates.

Tech organizations that purely depend on cloud-based solutions should continuously track servers to stabilize performance and maintain security of the cloud-servers and as such, it is important to implement server monitoring solutions that enable accurate maintenance. Although server monitoring can be utilized to track different aspects of a cloud-based company or solution based on the type of server, the key objective of server monitoring is to protect the server from potential threats, failures and technical discrepancies that may result in interrupted services. 

Server monitoring depends on the software solutions and  the cloud-based servers which need to be monitored. A server monitoring tool should ideally be scalable and should have the capability to regularly collect data from multiple cloud-based servers. 

Implementation and workflow of server monitoring

Workflows of server monitoring tools differ from one to another so, an organization must firstly identify the most important data points on each server that needs to be tracked. For example, the most crucial data point which needs to be tracked on an application server is it’s responsiveness, the latency and data loss of a data storage server and the speed on a web server just to name a few. Once these data points are identified depending on the server, it is important to set baseline values and thresholds to measure the performance of each server. In most cases, the first or the initial value of performance is considered the baseline performance value which the performance of the server will be measured against in future. Next, an organization must take necessary measures to configure data collection and analysis by ensuring the selected server monitoring tool is configured to pull data from the cloud-based servers. A server auto-generates event logs otherwise referred to as log files, which contain logs about user activity, application errors or failures, events related to security and other events which take place on the server. A powerful and well engineered log server monitoring tool should have the ability to swiftly stream the log files, track operating system details such as disk drives and performance, CPU memory availability, network connectivity, CPU usage, traffic and uptime on websites, and events. Unusual event logs can mean that a system is at a security risk or a discrepancy in the network or infrastructure exists. In order to detect such unusual events, a server monitoring tool should be set up in a way that it triggers an alert to notify the responsible team as soon as the performance drops below the set baseline values or detects any discrepancy related to the defined data points. In such events, the team should be readily available to respond to the alerts by investigating, analyzing the cause of each alert and finding solutions to the issues ensuring minimal downtime. They can also have backup solutions or workarounds to get the servers up and running temporarily until the issue has a permanent fix.

Once a company implements an orderly workflow during and after the implementation of a powerful server monitoring tool, they can reap the benefits of their investment by keeping the network and infrastructure stable and secure, responding to operational issues promptly and reducing downtime. 

Nagios Log Server

Powerful log monitoring tools and management applications such as Nagios LS enables organizations to quickly view, sort and configure logs from any source, on any given network. The Nagios Log Server enables users to gain a performance snapshot of their network’s infrastructure by allowing them to analyze, collect and store log data. This powerful server monitoring tool is configured to receive Windows event logs, Linux syslogs, network device syslogs and other log information from any Windows and Linux machine. 

Benefits of Nagios Log Server

User-friendly

  • Simplifies the overall process of searching log data. 
  • Rapid alerting and notification systems 
  • Quick configuration through easy source wizards

Adaptable and Scalable 

  • Easily integrate with third-party solutions on existing infrastructure
  • Fully accessible API enabling complete integration of external applications
  • Easy addition of Nagios Log Server instances to monitoring cluster
  • Quick addition of power, speed and storage to overall log analysis platform
  • Adapt with a click of a button

Real-time data

  • Correlate log events within a matter of clicks
  • View log data in real time, investigate, analyze issues and provide solutions immediately

Network Security

  • Define key thresholds and get notified through the web-interface
  • Notify users via Nagios XI/Nagios Core, email, SNMP traps or execute a script for rapid problem resolution
  • Retain historical archives of all events and comply with security requirements

Multiple User Management

  • Advanced multi-user capabilities enable IT teams to work efficiently
  • Modify, add, remove users and set access permissions
  • Grant authorized access to the external API via an access key

Custom Dashboards

  • Create a custom dashboard in the web-interface to gain a quick snapshot of important data.
  • Share dashboards with a custom URL 
  • Powerful GUI that facilitates customization of layout, design and preferences on a per-user basis

Network Insights

  • Provides users with advanced awareness of their infrastructure
  • Detailed reports on network events, logs and security
  • Minimize security threats with a sensitive alerting system
  • Quick resolution of network related issues

Nagios Log Server is licensed based on the number of cluster Instances you implement in your environment. A Nagios Log Server system consists of any number of cluster server Instances and Instance communicates with other instances to both replicate/backup data as well as load-balance a system to maintain an efficient log monitoring system. We guide organizations to swiftly implement Nagios Log Server system to ensure a smooth transition to a powerful server monitoring tool which enhances overall business potential by increasing customer satisfaction with minimal downtime. 

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