---
# source: src/content/services/en/monitoring.md
# route:  /en/services/monitoring/
title: Monitoring
group: support
audience: [enterprise, provider]
order: 3
tags: [monitoring, managed-services]
summary: Every system can raise an alert. The skill is relating them to each other rather than receiving fifty messages for one outage.
photo: monitoring-wall
photoNeed: "A monitoring dashboard at 2am tone: dark room, one screen, one person"
stub: false
draft: false
---

## The actual problem

Every product, hardware and software alike, can send alerts. That is precisely the
difficulty: in a single outage the host, the storage, the database and the application all
speak up at once, and in that volume the one message naming the cause gets lost.

## What a monitoring estate has to do

It is made of senders and receivers, and its job is correlation: relating messages to each
other so that fifty events become one incident. Only then is analysis possible at all.

## Two kinds, and both are needed

**Proactive monitoring** reports the trend leading to the outage, and so prevents it
happening at all. These are mostly the vendors' cloud-based services, which hold your
estate against failure patterns seen in very many other installations.

**Reactive monitoring** reports that something is broken. These are mostly the on-premises
systems, and they are what the alerting sits on top of.

Run only the second and you reliably learn about the outage. Run both and you learn about
it beforehand.

## What it includes

Hardware, applications, services and networks are monitored, around the clock and without
agents on the systems. A dashboard shows the state of the infrastructure, alerting goes by
email and SMS, and an alert opens a ticket automatically at the service desk and, where
needed, with the vendor.

## What we work with

Our partners' products, or open-source products where those fit better. What suits depends
on which interfaces your systems already serve.

## What to watch

Before rollout we settle which message reaches whom and what happens next. Alerts with no
agreed response get ignored within weeks, and then they are missing when it counts.