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.
