Monitoring System - Metrics, Monitor, and Alert
Understanding the health of your infrastructure is essential for ensuring the reliability, stability, and performance of your operation. And the best way to gain this insight is to deploy a robust monitoring system that collects metrics, visualizes data, and sends a notification to prompt operators when things seem to fall outside of your expected ranges.
What are metrics, monitoring, and alerting?
Why they are important? What types of opportunities they provide?
What type of data to track in a monitoring system?
Metrics, monitoring, and alerting are The three primary components of a monitoring system. They provide valuable insight into the health and performance of your infrastructure. When used together. They show you usage or behaviour patterns, assist you with troubleshooting and identifying issues and help you understand the impact of any changes you make to your infrastructure. When metrics fall outside of pre-setting thresholds, the monitoring systems notified and prompt operators to investigate issues and assist in surfacing information to identify possible root causes.
What Is Metrics? Why Do We Collect Them?
Metrics are the input, the raw data of resource, usage or behaviour observed and gathered for monitoring infrastructure performance, health, and availability.
Metrics are useful because they give you valuable insight into your infrastructure’s behaviour and health. They represent the raw data that your monitoring system uses to create a holistic view of your environment, automate responses to changes, and notified users when something appears to be broken. Metrics are numerical data that are used to analyse past patterns, correlate diverse factors, and track changes in your performance, consumption, or error rate.
What is Monitoring? Do You Need It?
While metrics are the raw data, monitoring is the process of collecting, aggregating, and analysing the metrics collected in your environment. A good monitoring system provides real-time essential insight into your entire infrastructure with timely alert notification by using a monitoring solution to collect, visualize, and initiating automated responses.
Monitoring solutions manage data over periods of time, including sampling and aggregating older data with visualizations. Monitoring systems also make it possible to organize and correlate data from diverse sources. Finally, the monitoring system is a platform for defining alerts and sending notifications.
What is Alerting? Why Is Alerting Important?
Alerting is a reactive component of a monitoring system that initiates activities in response to changes in metric values specified in alerting rules.
The primary goal of alerting is to notify the users of a problem, while also providing as much information as possible to assist them in determining the origin of the problem and executing a mitigation strategy to improve mean time to resolution.
What should you choose to Monitor?
While it is ideal, it might not be possible or even practical to track everything related to your infrastructure.
Factors to consider when choosing what to monitor:
- Define the scope to track based on available and reasonably manageable resources.
- Some downtime is not critical and does not have a direct impact on the operation.
- Tracked unnecessary metrics with no immediate or potential use in the future will only stress the scarce resources.
The factors that influence your decisions will depend on your available resources and the level of service you need.
The important characteristics to consider when evaluating a monitoring system are as follows.
- The monitoring system is to be a stand-alone system, separate from the system that it is monitoring.
- Since a monitoring system is responsible for collecting, storing, and providing access to high-value information, it must be dependable.
- It has to be easy to operate with useful and consumable metrics data to human operators.
- Maintain a comprehensive data history to established trends, patterns, and consistencies over long timelines.
- The ability to adapt to add new or remove decommissioned machines and continue to function to meet the new requirement.
- Powerful enough to compose thoughtfully and trigger actionable notification and flexible enough to send the notification through different mediums for maximizing resolution speed.
Conclusion
An efficient monitoring system depends on the collection of the right metrics from all the components in your infrastructure and defining meaningful and actionable alerts. Being able to determine what is happening in your environment, what resources you need to pay attention to, where the bottlenecks are, and what is the cause of the outage is invaluable. A reliable monitoring system helps to detect and resolve the problem faster with minimum unproductive downtime.
Exxel Technology provides a flexible, efficient, and cost-effective 24/7 monitoring system. Capable of monitoring equipment, machines, facilities, energy, and environment that sends real-time status updates through SMS, messaging apps, and email, anytime and anywhere.
Ready to get started with a monitoring solution? Feel free to contact the Exxel team for a non-obligated discussion.
