Monitoring Introduction

Abstract

In its basic form, monitoring is the practice of continuously observing a running system and notifying the system administrators when problems occurs. This is accomplished using dedicated software that accesses various properties of the system at regular sampling rates and computes specific metrics.

Motivation

Availability, performance and security are main requirements of modern software and hardware systems. A few seconds of unexpected downtime, slower applications or security breaches can be very costly and can compromise trust. Employing monitoring makes the admin and developers aware of any system shortcomings and gives them the opportunity to fix it as soon as possible. In practice, most monitoring software also offers visualisations options of the respective metrics over time, which provides the network administrator with additional insights.

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Contributing authors: Andrei Ionita Status of this document: work in progress
Last day modified: 2021-06-09