11.3. Proactive Monitoring Tools

Proactive monitoring tools are tools that have the ability to monitor your environment and warn you before something in the environment fails. With properly implemented and integrated monitoring tools, you can drastically reduce your service center costs by eliminating problems that would generate calls before they happen. This also reduces customer downtime. These two benefits together can significantly reduce your company's total cost of ownership for information technology.

Monitoring is only one capability of these tool sets. Most also have remote control, software distribution, reboot, execute, and hardware and software inventorying capabilities tightly integrated. Inventory (asset management) and remote control have already been discussed, so this section will focus on monitoring capabilities and benefits.