IT & Business Activity Monitoring: The Genesis

1. The Chaos of the Early Stage

At the initial stages of business development, its structure, processes, and technological foundation evolve in a rather chaotic manner. Budgets are limited while needs are extensive. It is natural for business processes to remain unstable, constantly adapting; IT infrastructure and business automation tools are underdeveloped and cover only the minimum requirements.

The primary goal at this point is to become profitable, reach operational stability, and only then begin planning further development and associated investments.

In such challenging conditions, the most critical factor is the technical team’s ability to build infrastructure, install system software and applications, and provide ongoing support with minimal resources. IT administrators periodically evaluate the condition of individual server and network components. Issues are detected only when an application or service fails. Business activity data is derived from application reports or internal databases, typically once a week.At this stage, IT infrastructure monitoring — let alone business activity monitoring in its modern understanding — simply does not exist.

2. Separate Monitoring

This stage marks the transition of the business into stable growth. There is clarity regarding future plans, market positioning, and marketing strategy, and budgets for development begin to appear. The organization can finally bring order to its operational and technological landscape.

This includes defining organizational structure, employee responsibilities, internal and external business processes, and requirements for business automation tools and IT infrastructure. Typically, the first major IT modernization takes place here: the company adopts branded, scalable hardware solutions, creates infrastructure diagrams and documentation, and establishes standards.IT must now ensure continuous business operations — and monitoring becomes essential, preferably proactive.

Naturally, hardware vendors offer their own monitoring tools. Organizations finally gain the ability to track the health of servers (physical and virtual), operating systems, storage systems, network equipment, performance metrics, utilization levels, availability, and application health.

However, there’s a significant drawback: these are all separate systems, each from a different vendor, none providing a unified view.Moreover, different IT and application components are often assigned to different individuals, divisions, or even departments. When a failure occurs, multiple systems may generate alarms, sometimes in large volumes.

How quickly can the root cause be identified?

Who is responsible for resolving it?

The absence of a unified monitoring platform results in slower incident resolution, higher workload on technical staff, and in many cases, the need for additional personnel.

What about business activity monitoring?

At this stage, companies usually develop internal reporting based on data from business applications and their own databases. This includes financial metrics and various KPIs. Each functional department produces its own management reports—often disconnected and inconsistent. Such analytics remain retrospective, useful mostly for analyzing past performance and adjusting future plans, but not for real-time decision-making.

3. Comprehensive Monitoring

Successful business growth inevitably expands and complicates IT infrastructure. Along with increasing expectations around performance and reliability, this tightens requirements for reaction time and incident resolution.

Separate monitoring tools, for the reasons described above, can no longer deliver the required efficiency.The solution becomes obvious:the company must implement a unified monitoring system for all IT infrastructure components—and ideally, for applications as well—independent of vendor or technology stack.

Fortunately, the market offers a broad range of such solutions. Some focus solely on infrastructure metrics, others incorporate application monitoring, log analysis, transaction tracing, and more. This approach eliminates many limitations of separate tools and provides powerful capabilities.

However, is it perfect? Does it suit everyone?

• Simplified tools monitor infrastructure metrics but fail to reveal application behavior.

• Advanced solutions are often too complex to implement and configure, suitable mostly for software development companies and high-tech enterprises.

• They are expensive and nearly always require project-based deployment and external expertise.

• Integration with existing tools is often problematic, while a full replacement is too costly and disruptive.

Most importantly — we still cannot see how IT performance impacts business outcomes.

Meanwhile, business continues searching for clarity using other methods. Static KPI reports are no longer sufficient. Business analytics tools, capable of processing massive volumes of structured and unstructured data, can model strategies and support long-term planning — but are they enough for real-time business management?

In a fast-changing world, decision-makers need to know right here, right now the current values of key business indicators. They must be able to monitor them in real time — something traditional analytics cannot deliver.

4. Business Observability

This brings us to the core challenge faced by modern, dynamic, technology-driven organizations in the era of digitalization.

Traditional monitoring tools provide valuable information about servers, networks, operating systems, applications, and other technical components, but this data alone does not always explain how an infrastructure issue affects a business service or business performance.

As IT environments grow larger and more complex, organizations may use different monitoring systems across multiple infrastructure components and teams. This can result in an overload of dashboards, metrics, and alerts while leaving one fundamental question unanswered: how does IT performance impact the business?

This is where business observability becomes essential. It connects business and IT environments within a unified monitoring model, enabling organizations to understand relationships between infrastructure performance, business services, and KPIs.

The I&B Monitoring Platform brings these capabilities together within a single system, providing simultaneous visibility into:

• IT infrastructure – including physical and virtual servers, worker nodes, containers, operating systems, and other infrastructure components.

• Applications – monitoring the systems and applications on which business processes depend.

• IT services – interconnected IT functions that support business processes, deliver value to users, and enable desired business outcomes.

• Layers – logical levels within the IT architecture, such as operating systems, databases, application logic, and applications.

• Business KPIs – metrics aligned with the organization’s business processes and objectives.

The platform also reflects the logical and organizational structure of the business. Monitoring can be organized around elements such as:

• Business – a logical grouping of business units and services.

• Business Unit – an organizational division within the company.

• Subunit – a specific segment of a business unit, typically focused on a particular function.

  
  

For each structural element, organizations can define and monitor relevant business metrics and KPIs. This makes it possible to identify where a performance-impacting issue originates and understand whether it affects an infrastructure component, application, IT service, business process, or business KPI.

One of the key advantages of the I&B Monitoring Platform is therefore its ability to represent the relationship between IT infrastructure and the business, as well as their mutual influence.

The business gains visibility into the state of IT and its ability to support critical business processes and objectives. At the same time, IT teams gain the context needed to understand the business impact of technical issues and demonstrate the need for timely infrastructure development and upgrades as business demands grow.

Unlike many complex monitoring products, the platform supports fast implementation using internal resources and can integrate with existing monitoring systems and business analytics tools. Its relatively low cost makes it suitable for organizations of different sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises with complex organizational and technological structures.

By bringing business and IT performance indicators together within a single application, the I&B Monitoring Platform enables organizations to understand, correlate, and act on the metrics that truly matter. It provides a unified business service monitoring environment built on IT monitoring best practices, supporting real-time, data-driven business management and decision-making.

A true Single Point of Truth.