Monitoring is supposed to allow your technical staff to focus on the future needs of the business rather than fighting fire after fire. Far too often monitoring is implemented as a ping and page service, your staff learns of an issue right after your users do. While this can not be prevented in all situations it should not be the norm. Proactive monitoring gives your staff the tools they need to be aware of the status of your computing environment to prevent or predict that next call to the help desk.