In the long run, the benefits outweigh the costs. And the good news you don’t have to do it yourself. Monitoring your IT infrastructure, including your network and applications, is something that’s easier than ever to outsource. Here’s six clear reasons why you need to monitor your always-on business:

Find problems right away: 24/7 monitoring provides real-time information as to how your infrastructure is performing, and gives immediate notification of any abnormalities – it’s not buried in a weekly or monthly report long after it makes an impact on your operations.  Round the clock monitoring means you or your service provider can respond immediately.

Fix problems right away: There’s a reason why people don’t like Mondays – they’re often full of nasty surprises, like a key part of your infrastructure going down over the weekend. Always-on, real-time monitoring means troubleshooting begins as soon as a problem is discovered and before it disrupts your workflow. Or worse still, your customers.

Go with flow: Today’s network and application monitoring tools can be tweaked and tuned to fit your infrastructure.  This customization eliminates false positive alerts and ensures accurate reporting, so you really know what’s going on.

It’s a learning experience: Done correctly, 24/7 monitoring works together with your IT service ticketing system to identify trends or patterns in the alerting to more accurately identify issues and provide recommendations to build a stronger infrastructure for your services.

It’s an early warning system: Not all alerts will mean a system is down.  Some are symptoms of a larger problem that can be resolved proactively before it becomes a major disruption to business operations.

Increase accountability: Putting in place 24/7 monitoring backs up any Service Level Agreement (SLA) you have in place with your service provider and helps you avoid finger pointing if something goes wrong.

If your technology partner has full visibility into your infrastructure, they can better live up to their commitments. Proactively monitoring your infrastructure 24/7 means you can see any bumps in the road and avoid them with time to spare.

Blair Lantz is a senior engineer at Supra ITS who helps customers proactively monitor their infrastructure 24/7 so they can keep their customers in business.