Almost 68% of employees in the tech industry are working fully or mostly remotely. Even in many other industries, the percentage of remote work is increasing. Organizations are adopting systems that allow employees to access content remotely to facilitate this shift.
These enterprise content management (ECM) systems need continuous monitoring. Instead of having an extensive IT team that works round the clock, the smart choice is to adopt monitoring solutions.
That’s where tools like Reveille come into the picture. Reveille helps maintain the health of ECM systems. In this guide, we’ll learn why ECM requires monitoring and which components to focus on.
Table of Contents
- What is ECM Application Monitoring?
- Why is ECM Monitoring Important?
- What Elements of ECM Require Monitoring?
- Monitor Your ECM With Reveille
- Start ECM Monitoring Today
What is ECM Application Monitoring?
ECM (Enterprise Content Management) application monitoring involves intimately observing, analyzing, and managing ECM software’s performance, security, and availability.
This process encompasses various aspects, including;
- System uptime
- Resource utilization
- User activity
- Data integrity
- Compliance adherence
By monitoring ECM applications, administrators can identify potential issues, ensure optimal performance, and proactively address anomalies or failures.
Some key metrics in application performance monitoring include response times, throughput, error rates, storage usage, and security events.
Effective ECM application monitoring maintains content management systems’ reliability, security, and efficiency. This supports seamless business operations and user experiences.
Why is ECM Monitoring Important?
Imagine this. Your customer support team is handling important client communication issues. Your ECM system that provides support solutions goes down. Would your client wait for it to get started again? Even if they do, wouldn’t this experience hamper your reputation?
That’s why you need ECM monitoring. It ensures prevalent issues get solved at the earliest so work is not hampered.
ECM monitoring tools like Reveille provide critical benefits like:
- Notifying about issues at their earliest point
- Having complete ECM visibility and infrastructure monitoring, even for multiple ECM platforms
- 24/7 monitoring without any agents
- Saving time by automating tasks such as system restart
- Preventing downtime and major issues like data theft
- Doing more with less headcount
The data gathered while application monitoring is a goldmine. It offers insight into the best solutions to take your organization forward, including capacity planning, optimal resource allocation, license management, and maintaining content security.
Here’s how Reveille helped a financial services giant monitor application performance and content security across all their content services.
What Elements of ECM Require Monitoring?
An ECM system is made up of core components. These core components require continuous monitoring to identify and proactively resolve issues before they hamper your system’s health.
1. Performance Monitoring
This involves finding performance issues by assessing different metrics and components like:
- Response time: Monitors the time taken by the ECM system to respond to user requests
- Throughput: Assesses the rate at which the system processes content-related tasks.
- Resource utilization: Tracks the usage of system resources such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network bandwidth
- Scalability: Determines the system’s ability to accommodate growing content volumes and user loads
- Error rates: Tracking the frequency of errors and failures encountered during content management operations.
- Indexing/search efficiency: Assessing the speed and accuracy of content indexing and search operations within the ECM system
2. Application Availability Monitoring
Application availability monitoring in ECM involves ensuring continuous access to ECM software’s cloud environment or on-premise solution. It includes;
- Monitoring system uptime
- Availability
- Responsiveness to detect and address any issues that could disrupt this access
This monitoring involves tracking server availability, network connectivity, database responsiveness, and application health.
Automated monitoring tools like Reveille can periodically check the ECM application’s availability and performance, alerting administrators to anomalies or failures. You can use Reveille’s dashboard to get a bird’s-eye view of whatever is wrong with different monitors and ensure business continuity.
Ensuring high application availability in ECM is critical. It helps cut downtime, maximize productivity, and provide users seamless access to content management capabilities.
3. Content Access and Usage Monitoring
Content access and usage monitoring involves tracking how users interact with content within an ECM. It includes monitoring who accesses which content, when they access it, and how they use it.
This monitoring helps organizations understand;
- Where issues arise quickly by correlating user data, ECM data, and infrastructure data that ECM monitoring tools have in one place
- Identify popular or critical content
- Ensure compliance with security and regulatory policies
Additionally, Reveille can detect unusual or unauthorized access patterns, alerting administrators to potential security breaches. Our ECM software can automatically deny access when a certain threshold hits. You can also generate an audit report for compliance.
4. Security and Compliance Monitoring
This involves ensuring that content stored and managed within the system adheres to security protocols and regulatory requirements. It includes;
- Monitoring access controls
- Encryption measures
- Audit trails
- Compliance with industry standards such as HIPAA, GDPR, or SOX
For instance, in a financial institution, ECM security monitoring may involve tracking access to sensitive financial documents, ensuring only authorized personnel can view or modify them.
Automated tools like Reveille can detect unauthorized access attempts and policy violations. The relevant personnel can then be notified, and potential risks can be mitigated.
5. Resource Utilization Monitoring
Resource utilization monitoring involves tracking the allocation and consumption of computing resources within the ECM infrastructure. This includes monitoring CPU usage, memory usage, disk capacity and network bandwidth.
For example, a large corporation implementing ECM may monitor resource use. This monitoring helps identify whether its servers handle the increasing volume of processed and stored content.
Administrators can allocate extra resources or optimize workflows to maintain system performance if resource utilization spikes during peak usage times.
Reveille provides metrics like user levels, session counts and transaction performance levels to help organizations use resources effectively.
6. Integration and API Monitoring
Integration and API Monitoring is a process that ensures seamless communication and interoperability between the ECM system and other applications or services through APIs. This ensures that data exchange and workflows remain uninterrupted, enhancing productivity and efficiency.
For example, ECM integration with case management software in a legal firm allows lawyers to access relevant documents directly from their case files. Monitoring APIs ensures these integrations function, tracking data transmission, response times, and error rates.
Additionally, integration monitoring verifies that updates or changes to APIs do not disrupt ECM functionalities or compromise data integrity. As we know systems are constantly changing, and this can cause disruption concerning other applications, but Reveille can be ahead of these disruptions.
Reveille connects with different tools and platforms. Notable integrations include Splunk, Power BI, ServiceNow and ConnectWise.
7. User Experience Monitoring
User experience monitoring focuses on assessing the usability, accessibility, and satisfaction of users interacting with the ECM system.
This process involves tracking various metrics, including;
- Response times
- Page load times
- Search efficiency
- Navigation ease
For instance, in a corporate setting, this involves analyzing how quickly employees can locate and retrieve documents needed for their tasks. Speed ensures minimal friction in accessing essential information.
Monitoring tools like Reveille can capture user activity to identify pain points and areas for improvement in the ECM interface.
Organizations can monitor and optimize user experience, enhance employee productivity, streamline workflows, and increase user satisfaction.
Monitor Your ECM With Reveille
Reveille plays an important role in ECM monitoring. It has built-in tests that can be automatically scheduled and deployed at specific intervals.
A biopharmaceutical company used Reveille to stabilize its content environment and obtain visibility of problems before end users got affected. By getting immediate notifications through our platform, they proactively resolved problems.
This reduced application outages and stabilized content repositories.
Start ECM Monitoring Today
Mastering ECM application monitoring is not only a necessity, but it’s a competitive advantage in today’s world.
ECM monitoring helps maintain security standards while managing ECM performance, delivering speed, optimization and regulatory compliance to your organization.
By leveraging Reveille’s advanced monitoring capabilities, businesses can proactively identify and address potential issues, ensuring seamless content management operations. Explore more strategies on ECM on our blog or request a demo to understand the tool better.