Most companies with Intranet web applications are concerned about uptime and performance for their internal users but fail to show it.  Since internal applications are typically supported by a very small staff, usually one person, let’s call him John, who also has other responsibilities, monitoring uptime is an often overlooked component because “if it goes down, John will take care of it.” 

Let’s be realistic.  John, your sys admin/dba/support tech/you, is often very busy and is constantly dropping everything to figure out why the Intranet application is down.  When he does stop all his other important tasks to solve the problem, everyone in the company scratches their head, “why is it down?”, “when will it be back up?”, but few actually follow through and look for a better solution than relying on John.

The solution: Automated Monitoring.  No surprise.  The reason for doing it is simple: it can automate the process of detecting downtime and even take proactive measures to get things going again, e.g. restart the web server or database. 

This may seem blatantly obvious, but the fact is that many companies don’t do it.  I find this frankly shocking.  The main reason seems to be that it’s just not that important because it’s a. for internal use, b. it’s not worth the effort because John can take care of it, or c. we don’t have the budget to do it.

In answer to these reasons, I will state the obvious: a. internal users are important too, b. John is too busy to be putting out another fire, and c. (here’s the big one) you are losing money by not monitoring!  Just do it already.