City councils run like the central nervous system that links and serves a large community of people, companies, and establishments to make a city a complex, bustling melting pot.

Touching every life across the population—right down to the last mile—city councils provide digital access to essential services and information systems and ensure they are easily accessible to safeguard civic well-being, law and order, and quality of life for everyone.

Australia, in particular, has city councils of varying sizes, with IT teams managed by different teams that rely on hybrid IT infrastructure. Typically using a mix of on-premises infrastructure like virtual machines and cloud deployments on platforms like Azure, city councils are now rapidly moving to the cloud-first era.
 
While Australian city councils are at the forefront of digital transformation, they also rely on sticky and persistent on-premises IT infrastructure to store and process critical information.

Connecting legacy IT with cloud-based installations is a mix of motley tools that monitor, manage, and ensure a reliable user experience for its citizens. In this scenario, monitoring cannot be an afterthought and has to be implemented holistically to check all that moves within.

Often, even in large organizations, IT management tools are not acquired holistically, and they tend to accumulate over time. IT tool sprawl refers to such a long-drawn accumulation of many varied IT management and monitoring tools in an organization.

Often cluttered, an unmanaged IT tool set suffers from overlapping functions (redundancies), and bloat (unnecessary features) that cost a lot, while many team members will not even know certain tools even existed.

Managing IT tools and rationalizing them requires management acumen combined with coaching to ensure what is needed is bought, and what is bought is used.

While many popular IT monitoring tools offer a piecemeal approach to IT monitoring—which requires skilled IT teams to subscribe to more than one tool to manage it all—organizations such as city councils would benefit from a unifying tool.

Cutting complexity and ensuring reliability by monitoring all parts of a hybrid cloud stack, an ideal IT monitoring tool for an Australian city council should provide cloud-native observability that covers digital experience, infrastructure monitoring, and application performance.
 
Also, choosing a full stack IT monitoring platform that can grow with a dynamically, expanding IT stack, will ensure that IT teams get a centralized view of all the components within, encompassing websites, applications, network devices, infrastructure, and their logs for several years to come.

An ideal IT monitoring tool for a city council should have the following:

Comprehensive monitoring that covers the entire IT infrastructure, including server monitoring, network monitoring, application performance monitoring, database monitoring, and cloud monitoring.

Scalability to quickly expand reach to include new components under watch.

Real-time monitoring, alerting, and reporting capabilities that help monitor and analyze the state of your systems to identify issues in real time, resulting in quick resolution, reduced MTTR, and compliance with SLAs.

In-depth metrics and centralized logging gauge performance; store the logs in one easy-to-access place to unearth bottlenecks and identify potential for continuous improvement.

AIOps and automation can do more with less and with more accuracy by predicting outages, flagging the IT team to take action, and performing resolutions automatically whenever needed. AIOps and automation routines eliminate the need for manual intervention, saving time for IT teams to concentrate on important avenues.

Compliance with data privacy laws with robust reporting capabilities to ensure that data collection, storage, processing, and deletion happen as per applicable laws.

A user-friendly interface with easy-to-use navigation, a strong support team, training, and documentation material for IT personnel to use.

Integrations and plugins allow users to monitor any resource in the cloud and receive alerts on their preferred platforms.

ManageEngine Site24x7 goes beyond basic monitoring to cover the entire IT stack, offering city council IT teams a comprehensive observability experience that suits their fast-evolving modern IT environments.

With a unified monitoring approach, Site24x7 helps identify outages faster and helps with troubleshooting to bounce back from crises in the quickest time possible. While an IT system is always abuzz, Site24x7 knows how to separate the signal from noise, to alert IT teams only when it matters. Even so, the AI-powered observability platform ensures there are no false positives by performing multiple rechecks and through advanced threshold settings to alert only persistent issues.

ManageEngine Site24x7 is a comprehensive AI-powered observability platform for DevOps and IT operations. Site24x7 offers a complete suite of monitoring solutions—including digital experience, APM, infrastructure monitoring, and cloud monitoring—to help businesses ensure optimal performance and reliability of their IT environments.

With hosted status communication pages from Site24x7 StatusIQ, city council IT teams can set up real-time incident communication pages about incidents and planned maintenance to drive trust and reliability. With AIOps on board, the cloud-based observability platform Site24x7 is a fit for city council IT teams to ensure optimal performance and reliability of civic amenities for all citizens. Try Site24x7 today.