/ Best Practices

Observability for K-12 and higher education: Top 4 challenges and how monitoring can help

Observability for K-12 and Higher Education: Top 4 Challenges and How Monitoring Can Help

K-12 and higher education institutions experienced massive changes in 2020 with the shift to online learning. New challenges arose, such as an increase in cybersecurity threats, students and staff requiring 24/7 access to their computers, and the need to update and improve infrastructure and applications 

IT infrastructure monitoring allows K-12 and higher education institutions to face common technology challenges both reactively and proactively. With legacy systems in the past, schools are able to keep IT costs down and minimize risks. 

Hybrid Classroom Instruction

The pandemic required districts across the country to implement virtual learning, and while students have started to return to the classroom, this does not mark the end of online education. Digital resources are now and will remain to be an increasingly integral part of formal education.

Cybersecurity 

2020 marked a record-breaking year for cyberattacks targeting school districts in the U.S. With the new environment of virtual classrooms and online learning, school districts are more focused on cybersecurity than ever before. 

Broadband and Connectivity  

The pandemic proved that the education system in the U.S. was not equipped to support a hybrid learning model as it requires students, teachers, and administrators to have 24/7 access. Districts are expanding their wireless infrastructure and placing emphasis on the importance of off-campus connectivity for students who lack service at home. 

IT Adoption and Digital Learning Capabilities

Colleges and universities are starting to modernize legacy services and applications as students place an increased emphasis on digital capabilities as a deciding factor in choosing higher education. From class registration portals to online learning platforms, colleges and universities deploy services that millions of users rely on every day.

Hiring/Retaining IT Talent

Higher education is starting to focus on hiring and retaining top IT talent to support the importance of cutting-edge technology to students that is up and running 24/7. Talent needs to be able to draw useful insights and correlation from dynamic IT environments. 

Enabling Cross-Team Collaboration to Quickly Resolve Platform Issues

Information silos are a common unintended consequence of growth at educational institutions, and they can slow down efforts to resolve issues in critical academic services. Teams need to ensure that academic services perform seamlessly for their students and faculty across the globe.

Challenges Faced by the Education Industry   

The Need for 24/7 Access to Computers and Learning Tools 

24/7 access to virtual desktops requires monitoring VDI environments reactively and proactively. The quality and reliability of services and the digital educational experience is key to the success of colleges and universities in attracting students and building and maintaining their reputations.

Modernizing Legacy Services and Applications

As higher education institutions seek to modernize their learning environments, they face the unique challenge of safely replacing legacy systems while learning how to manage new, highly distributed infrastructure at scale. Institutions need to significantly improve the speed and reliability of their services and deliver a better experience for their students, educators, and administrators—all while keeping their IT costs down and minimizing risks.

IT Services That Can Drive Cost

IT departments are tasked with providing more and more services to enhance user satisfaction and engagement. Large technology investments are needed in order to support synchronous classroom and remote learning initiatives.

Security Threats 

Schools are more and more prone to phishing and ransomware attacks due to the increased adoption of virtual instructional models. In turn, institutions are required to comply with regulatory standards in order to keep their students’ data safe and secure. 

LogicMonitor Solution for Education

Helping Education Institutions Drive Innovation by Consolidating and Standardizing Monitoring for On-Premise and Cloud Environments

LogicMonitor provides comprehensive visibility into dynamic IT environments for your networks, cloud, applications, servers, log data, and more. Data correlation provides insights for intelligent troubleshooting and predicting bottlenecks to scale IT investments and control operational costs enabling enterprises to consolidate and streamline their observability estates.

Extensive Breadth of Coverage Across Complex IT Infrastructure and Ensuring the Reliability of All Digital Capabilities and Services

LogicMonitor’s agentless approach delivers an extensible solution with over 2,000 workflow and ecosystem integrations and unlimited dashboards. Automated discovery of new devices paired with intelligent alerting maximizes infrastructure health and performance by providing automated resolutions for Ops. Monitor resource utilization, network usage and performance, and other critical infrastructure metrics with support for: 

  • Networks and networking gear
  • Cloud and container resources
  • Servers, storage, and databases
  • Websites and synthetic transactions
  • SaaS services essential for remote work
  • Applications, IoT devices, and more

Rapid and Automatic Deployment and Configuration for Efficient Monitoring and Lessened Workloads 

Get the answers you need to solve problems faster with LogicMonitor’s fully automated platform. Our agentless collectors automatically discover, map, and set baselines for complex and distributed infrastructure in a matter of minutes. Put the manual configuration and expensive hardware behind you and ensure quicker time to train and lessened workloads on IT staff. 

Visibility for Teams to Modernize Services and Improve Application Performance at Scale

LogicMonitor prevents context switching with a single view of application services, performance, and infrastructure. LogicMonitor empowers teams to gather, track, trace, and measure application and infrastructure performance so they can achieve digital transformation initiatives with business outcomes – delivered via LogicMonitor’s Unified Observability Platform.

One Platform for Unified Observability

Metrics

Single platform for ITOps and DevOps that eliminates data silos and tracks metrics that matter. 100% built on OpenTelemetry and OpenMetrics allowing for a vendor-neutral approach to better understand the user experience and accelerate business transformation.

Logs

Log intelligence at scale – instant access to contextualized and correlated logs and metrics in a single, unified cloud-based platform. With tiered retention options, including unlimited retention, and hot storage to optimize data hygiene and internal compliance initiatives.

Traces

Gather application traces seamlessly with quick and simple implementation. Filter and highlight error occurrences or bottlenecks and transition to underlying resource performance for faster troubleshooting.

More from LogicBlog

K-12 and Higher Education: IT Trends, Challenges & Solutions
education / 04.18.2022
K-12 and Higher Education: IT trends, challenges & solutions

Download this solution brief to learn how LogicMonitor can help K-12 and higher education fast-track digital transformation.
Observability for K-12 and Higher Education: Top 4 Challenges and How Monitoring Can Help
education / 04.12.2022
Observability for K-12 and higher education: Top 4 challenges and how monitoring can help

IT infrastructure monitoring allows K-12 and higher education institutions to face common technology challenges both reactively and proactively. See how!
Ascham School Case Study
alert forecasting / 09.10.2021
Ascham School Transitions Seamlessly to Remote Learning and Increases Team Productivity by 60% With LogicMonitor

Ashcham School's IT team reduced critical IT alerts from 500 to 40 and reduced tickets by 50% within 90 days of implementing LogicMonitor. See how!
View All
Amps robot shadow

Let's talk shop, shall we?

Get started