Using network monitoring to justify your IT decisions

The most popular metric for measuring IT team success it downtime —
if you can measure how much it costs you, you can easily provide your boss with reports how much network downtime has been reduced after implementation.

Second metric is mean time to resolution, usually calculated as how long
it takes from ticket entered into helpdesk or alert received to problem solved/ticket closed.

If you have some SLA contracts from third-party service providers, you can use monitoring system to track if contracts are kept, penalties are due from them. You can also use it to win over disputes with providers if you can prove that it was their part of service not working, not something
in your network.

What business decision makers care about is business continuity.
You can argue that if you have solid network monitoring in place that includes both infrastructure data, performance data, and some visual documentation of your network structure, service architecture etc,
then this serves as admin/engineer brain data backup in case they die etc.

For non IT guys, you may need to provide some pretty graphical network views (something colorful that they seem to understand and “feel in control and in the know”, even better if it shows live data, changes color
if some event recorded, etc). Here are some examples of such views.

All this is possible with NetCrunch, with pricing in the lower realms of your budget ranges. Agentless, on prem but with low footprint and low resource usage, very easy to install and configure thanks to 670+ ready to use monitoring packs for most popular devices and systems.