Data collection layer one – Infrastructure
Infrastructure is the atomic layer in any architecture on which the whole stack of applications runs, serves customers, and drives revenues. Whether or not your team or organization is responsible for managing the infrastructure, having a view of the state of infrastructure in an observability implementation helps to quickly isolate or rule out infrastructure-related problems. This discipline that focuses on collecting health, resource utilization, and performance data of the infrastructure is called IT Infrastructure Monitoring (ITIM).
In this section, we will discuss what infrastructure means in the IT world, how we can collect data to monitor it, and why you should bother monitoring infrastructure at all.
Understanding infrastructure
In modern complex application architectures, infrastructure components can include (but is not limited to) physical servers, virtual machines, databases, containers, appliances, networks, storage...