Learning the monitoring basics
Monitoring has a few important purposes. It helps you achieve business continuity, carry out forecasting and trend analysis, test changes, build dashboards with your system's most crucial metrics, alert on-call personnel to potentially violated Service-Level Agreements (SLAs), and, in general, provide data for analytics, troubleshooting, and improved incident response. A well-monitored infrastructure will, for example, enable you to get the answers to the following questions:
- Will my system be able to handle the holiday rush? (Forecasting)
- What is my database growth rate so that I can plan for capacity in the near future? (Trend analysis)
- Did the latest software update affect performance? (Testing changes)
- How are customer needs evolving? (Business analytics and intelligence)
- Is there an on-going attack on the network? (Security analytics)
This level of observability relies on logging and metrics data sent by the various...