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IT Monitoring

goal is to have a majority of users experience adequate to good performance. Also to aviod a minority of users seeing extremely negative results.

  • real time monitoring and troubleshooting physical and virtual infrastructure. (like servers, network/cloud based systems or hardare)
  • better planing and IT-decision making process. (ex. identify bottlenecks, bandwith hogs etc.)
  • predicting and analyzing impact of IT operations on the business (ex. how much does a service cost vs revenue generated)
  • automated incident management / reporting
  • tracking end-user behaviors within an application. (what part of the app looses the user, metrics visited vs made purchase etc.)

Vorteile vs Nachteile​

Vorteile

  • Dauerhafter Überblich über gesamte It-Infrastruktur
  • Erhöhung der Verfügbarkeit, Optimierung der Ressourcen
  • Sichtbarkeit von Abhängigkeiten, Engpässen und Risiken
  • ideal/notwendig für komplexe Strukturen
  • kosten einspaarung für z.B. Bandbreiten Engpässe wegen falsch konfigurierte Hardware werden schneller erkannt

Nachteile

  • initiale Kosten, bzw für Anpassung / Verwaltung
  • Personalaufwand, Wissenmanagement, muss aufgebaut werden.
  • oftmals geschlossene Lösungen mit teils Inkompatibilitäten (z.B. für bestimmte Schnitstellen)
  • Remote Monitoring kann an Dienstleister ausgelagert werden, hier jedoch sehr hohe kosten.

Welcke Komponenten überwachen​

  • alle Hard- und Software.
  • Auslastungen / Speicherkapazitäten.
  • Anwendungen / Logs auf einem System. Prozese / Verzeichnisse.
  • Überwachung von Schnittstellen.

types of monitoring​

  • availability monitoring - keeping track of uptime and performance
  • web performance monitoring - like above with added metrics like page load time, errors, or package losses.
  • application management/application performance management - track customer facing applications to spot issues before they become to server for the user base.
  • api monitoring - enterprises that offer apis need to track availability and if everything is working properly.
  • real user monitoring - designed to record actual enduser interactions with a website or app.
  • security monitoring - specialized subset designed to detect breaches or unusual network acticity.
  • buisness activity monitoring - monitor the health of buisness performance metrics like sales-numbers, application downloads, volume of web traffic of any chosen business activity.

tools​

3 general monitoring tool categories / types of network devices. Based on how they are used:

  • ovservational tools - used to observe hardware, software or services and report back on their operational effectiveness.
  • analysis tools - tasked with taking ovservational data and analyzing it further.
  • Engagement tools - act on information from both analysis and ovservational tools. Ex: service tickets or alerts are automatically delivered to the appropriate IT-analyst.

best practices for IT monitoring​

  1. avoid alert fatigue, by setting up to many alerts to overwhelm the IT Team.

  2. categorize alerts by level of severity. Low level alerts can be handled automatically or be routed to junior analysts. While severe alerts should be routed immediately to senior staff.

  3. delivery path (email, text, mobile) appropriate for the level of alert.

  4. create good dashboards and iterate over them.

  5. embrace redundancy.