In today’s fast-paced, interconnected IT world, simply waiting for something to fail before fixing it isn’t good enough. A proactive approach to monitoring, which aims to identify and address potential issues before they escalate into major disruptions, is a necessity rather than a luxury.
Here at Zabbix, we’ve got plenty of reason to believe that we offer the most flexible monitoring solution available on the market today. However, choosing the best monitoring tool for your organization’s needs is only half the battle – you also need to get buy-in from team members who may not understand the need for monitoring, may be fearful of and resistant to change, and may not be familiar with the technologies behind monitoring.
In this post, we’ll take a look at a few strategies you can use to help win over lukewarm or hesitant colleagues and build a culture of monitoring. We’ll also explore how choosing Zabbix for your monitoring needs can make each strategy a bit easier to implement.
Table of Contents
Strategy 1: Explain the “why”
One of the first questions that you can anticipate during any change initiative is simply, “what for?” The ethos of “don’t fix what isn’t broken” runs strong in the tech community, and unless you go above and beyond to explain why monitoring matters, your team will remain skeptical.
Zabbix can help you make your case by providing you with the evidence you need to bolster your case. We’ve got plenty of testimonials available from tech communities worldwide (including PeerSpot, Gartner, and Capterra), and no matter what field you’re in or how big your team is, we’ve most likely got a case study or two available that shows how monitoring with Zabbix was a game changer for a company like yours.
All of this should help you explain the rationale for the change in an open and transparent way. When it comes to monitoring, sharing details on costs, expected benefits, and what will happen if no change is made will build understanding around why monitoring is necessary and why monitoring with Zabbix is the right answer for your team’s needs.
Strategy 2: Show your team what’s in it for them
One of the most effective ways to get employee buy-in for monitoring is by highlighting the benefits it will bring to individual employees. Show how monitoring can simplify their tasks, improve efficiency, and enhance their work experience, and give them concrete examples of how the technology can make their jobs easier or help them to deliver better results.
We recently had a large managed services provider (MSP) use our monitoring solution as a true “force multiplier”, allowing them to monitor their systems, automate tasks based on real-time events, and provide immediate responses to issues without manual intervention. Thanks to Zabbix, their engineers report higher job satisfaction thanks to no longer having to be “on call” at all hours to solve simple issues, while management has seen productivity skyrocket thanks to their team’s newfound ability to find potential issues before they become real problems.
Strategy 3: Turn important stakeholders into monitoring champions
Determine who monitoring will impact and who needs to be kept informed. This might be team leaders, IT staff, end users, and/or an executive sponsor. Getting input from these groups early on will help you anticipate needs and concerns, and you’ll also want to identify influential employees who are enthusiastic about monitoring and get them to help you promote it.
A great way to help them do so is by encouraging them to attend one (or more) Zabbix events – we’ve got free meetings, online meetups, regional conferences, or even our yearly Summit in Latvia. No matter where you happen to be located, there’s a pretty good chance that we’ll soon be bringing your key people a chance to network with like-minded professionals from multiple industries, expand their knowledge, get answers to their questions, and explore how Zabbix can work for them.
Strategy 4: Provide adequate training
Equipping employees with the skills and knowledge they need to get the most out of a monitoring system means gaining a solid understanding of their current capabilities and then finding out which gaps you most urgently need to fill. Chances are, you’ll need to provide guidance, documentation, hands-on demonstrations, and access to experts – and this is another area where Zabbix has you covered.
Zabbix Certified trainings are designed to help your people learn Zabbix inside and out, giving them the practical knowledge they’ll need to increase their productivity and performance. When you explore our training options, you’ll find a wide variety of courses, everything from one-day sessions that cover the basics to week-long sessions that guarantee users the ability to tackle any Zabbix challenge on their own.
In addition, we’ve got plenty of other free resources available to teams and individuals looking to upskill, including our famously active forum, blog, webinars, and newsletter.
Conclusion
Building a culture of monitoring requires commitment from every level of an organization. By choosing Zabbix as the guide to your monitoring journey and following the strategies outlined in this article, you and your team can successfully implement and maintain a robust monitoring strategy that will help you achieve your organization’s IT goals.
To learn more about what Zabbix can do for you, visit our website.