Collecting and saving monitoring data
Once you have instrumented your application, you will need to store your data somewhere. As I mentioned in the Instrumenting an application section of this chapter, there are many possible tools you can use. I will be talking about some of the tools, but be aware that there are many others. Talk to your friends, do research online, and try different tools to figure out what is best for you, your team, and your organization.
I tend to organize monitoring tools into two buckets. This is often a simplification of these systems, but it helps me to think about how they work. These two buckets are polling applications and push applications.
Polling applications
Polling (also known as pull) applications scrape data from a service and then store and display the data. Some of the complaints against polling applications are that you need to keep some record of all of your services to scrape. There's nothing wrong with polling applications, but this is just something...