Development of a Customizable Monitoring System for Information Infrastructure Components

Information technologies (IT) outsourcing is one of the most developing and innovative fields nowadays. Service providers (SPs) aim at becoming more trusted and popular among their competitors, so they focus on increasing quality of the provided services and customer satisfaction level. In order to guarantee sufficient service level, suppliers and customers sign a formal contract that controls liabilities of the parties called Service Level Agreement (SLA). Customer support, service reliability and availability are the key aspects described in the agreement; therefore, SPs are facing the problem of ensuring the required values of these parameters. Implementation of an automated infrastructure monitoring system is one of the most efficient solutions; however, existing platforms appear to be costly and difficult to configure, deploy and manage. They also require additional knowledge and trainings, so these systems can only be used by qualified administrators with special technical skills and experience. Nevertheless, technical support engineers also need a tool to obtain information about system components state in a real time mode. This work provides a study of partnership dependency on the level of the provided services and customer support, reviews common monitoring types and architecting patterns such as Façade, Service oriented architecture, Workload Distribution. The scope of the work is defined by the main responsibilities and performed tasks of expert support line engineers. The results of the analysis are used to develop logical and functional requirements for the monitoring service that can be managed by technical support specialists to respond to potential system outages in a proactive manner. These requirements are then implemented into the main components the created tool has. The monitoring system consists of a database and a Windows Service application that are based on Microsoft technologies such as Microsoft SQL Server and C# programming language.