Discussing with customers the expectations they have, regarding a monitoring system are pretty different across departments involved. As mentioned in the blog Finding the best Monitoring solution, it is essential to understand theses requirements and have these needs in focus while moving on. The monitoring solution has to support a wide range of requirements.
So let us take a look on generalized requirements without thinking in products. The slide below shows four different work areas, often causing trouble in the daily business of IT departments.
- Monitoring
This is the core area of a monitoring system. Gather data about any resource, regarding performance and availability. - Prediction
While feeding time series data from the monitoring component and other sources (like the event management system or log analysis, this system enables to detect anomalies earlier and helps to differentiate between common behavior and unexpected processing. - Event Management
Events are consolidated and correlated in one place, decreasing the complexity to follow in SOS situations where multiple components are involved and are monitored with different tools. This discipline is tremendous important, because most customers are using specialized tools to monitor their IT infrastructure, their IT network, the user experience, the cloud components/resources and so on. - Log Analysis
Most IT issues are fixed by consulting the required logs. Wide spread logs hamper this activity. It is very important to collect and consolidate these logs in one place and make them actionable to search, scan, sort and analyze these information sources efficiently.
Monitoring is more than sensing the availability and performance of a single IT resource. It is essential to do so, but several other steps have to follow.
Most IT monitoring projects fail over time, because the value for the business can’t be manifested over time. IT monitoring is not a short shot project. It is more a travel which never ends. It has to change as the IT landscape changes. That means, it must be as flexible as possible to support the requirements of tomorrow. A dedicated responsibility should be defined, that supports the monitoring requirements over time. Today, DevOp departments exactly take over this role – but it helps, having a common monitoring infrastructure on hand, ready to be used, flexible enough to integrate new tools.