Application, System, Network Monitoring Practices

Every organization, small or big, shall monitor Applications and infrastructure that power their business.The monitoring shall be adopted same as your regular business operations. As more and more, organizations depend on software applications and systems to do business, ensuring that those applications are available for them to conduct their regular business is very important. It is as important as business associates. In this post, I will summaries monitoring practices and why it is a necessary for both big and small business.

What is monitoring means in Technology space?

Monitoring your infrastructure and application is must to ensure that your trusted software tools are available for you to do your business. Monitoring Practice allows you to know about the health of your applications as well as their usage. The bi-product of this is that you will be monitoring the security of the system.

As security is paramount and there are more and more bad actors that are either outright stealing the data or damaging your data, it is important to know if there are intruders or attempted intrusion in your system.

So far in this series, we’ve discussed what metrics, monitoring, and alerting are and the qualities of good monitoring systems. We talked about gathering metrics from your infrastructure and applications and the important signals to monitor throughout your infrastructure. In our last guide, we covered how to put metrics and alerting into practice by understanding individual components and the qualities of good alert design.

How do you monitor?

There are many tools that are available in the market place. Also, each application vendor either has or recommendation on how to monitor. All the cloud vendors provide monitoring services including for your cost runs.

Your key consideration are :

  • Type of application – home grown or vendor, language platform, technology standards
  • Infrastructure – what type of infrastructure that you have established
  • Business Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and associated metrics
  • Technology Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and associated metrics
  • Control points where you require alerting

Other details to consider are:

  • If you are in cloud, you shall use cloud service to monitor
  • If you have your own data center, then you need to choose from market place and implement
  • What type of application do you have – is it home grown, then you will need to ensure you have all the ducks in row for proper monitoring. If it is is vendor products, they will provide you guidance if not the full implementation of monitoring
  • Infrastructure – if you are in cloud, you can use the service that is provided
  • If you are in your own datacenter – then you will need to choose and implement.

What are the outcomes of monitoring?

The reason you are investing on this to protect your business and investment in technology. Once you have the KPIs and Metrics that you need, you can set different levels of alerts on your control points to inform you that any of those criteria have met. When there is a breach, you will get notified and you can take a proper action.

There are cases that you will take a proactive action such as your disk is getting filled.

What are the benefits of monitoring besides securing your systems?

Today’s fashion is to be able to use technology resources only when needed – that is on demand. The cloud vendors enable to have an ability to do this. However, either you are small or big and you depend on an application, it is not like you are switching your Laptop and start working, the application normally hosted and running all the time. However, current technology allows to host an application in a efficient manner that is an application may be hosted in a small machine for few users. When user demand grows, the applications are automatically added to handle the load. This is called auto-scaling and this is only possible if you can monitor and know that there are more users are using the system. Once, users are the done, then the application will power down those that is necessary.

Conclusion

Monitoring is a must. If you are a medium to big size company, then you have the constant need of what is the status of my technology investment and how it is being utilized. Monitoring framework gives you how systems are being used and also how well it is being used. It slow tells if there are going to be problem or is already a problem.

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Some good reads are as follows: