Effective management is a crucial thing for every Infrastructure Monitoring, which enables you to monitor the performance of your on-going systems and the availability in that manner you can proactively take decisions to keep up high uptime.
While adopting a monitoring system, it should solve the problems for you rather than you solves for it. It has been observed that same tools have been implemented by the company A and company B, but what benefits company A receives is not for company B. What are those practices implemented by successful companies? It’s required to implement a few definite combinations of practices for the betterment of the organisational monitoring systems which are discussed here.
Use Data-Centric Way
Monitoring tools are specifically collecting data. Better monitoring tools cover metrics and telemetry data at top- tier, thus it’s easy to export the data. They are trying to move the data “up” to be stored, processed, and analysed in combination with data collected by all the other tools, on all the other systems, throughout the organization.
Thus, treating the data-collectors in a data-centric way rather than a tool-centric way ultimately means tools that can be adapted is no longer depend on each other, so that we create a unique source of telemetry data that we can connect to any new tools we want to use in the future.
Use Monitoring for Feedback
Most of the successful monitoring systems are driven by intension. They are developed to provide an operational feedback about the production systems to those who interpreted that how those systems work. Importantly, for those who have chosen what to monitor regarding those systems supported that information. Your organization’s Engineers should understand the metrics, whatever is being monitored because each metric should be designed by an engineer to answer a selected question, or provide a concrete insight about the operational features of your service.
Monitoring is not a shot to unto itself. It’s not even a disaster recovery plan or backup system. It’s an engineering process, which exists to provide feedback from the things we build, maintain and care for. It’s your best understanding of the operational characteristics systems on which you rely upon. Through monitoring, you can gain visibility into those places where we cannot even reach. It’s useful for quantifying the success and to prevent explosions occurring accidently.
Implement an Alert System
A monitoring system with alerts will be beneficial to draw graphs without stress; also it will remove the man-made errors at the critical time of completion. While implementing an alert system, for analysing and isolating the alerts, it’s very important that the system uses the same data for generating both alerts and the graphs. If one monitoring system generates positive alerts and other generating negative alerts, means they are measuring different things under the same machine. But, there is no way to identify which one is telling the truth. Ultimately, the unavoidable result is that your engineers will start to ignore both monitoring systems because of no trust. Therefore, good monitoring systems require a single source of truth.
Systematize processing
Most of the enterprisers’ create a plan of lists first, and then choose the monitoring system as per the plans to fulfill it. But, unfortunately, it has been observed that the good monitoring system will do the opposite of it. They plan and develop a substrate, which is a common, company-wide service for processing telemetry data from the monitoring system. After that, they empower and motivate every engineer in spite of team affiliation to send monitoring data whenever it’s required.
Great monitoring systems standardize on metrics processing, storage, analysis, and visualization, but they declare open season on data collectors. Every engineer should be free to execute whatever means they consider appropriate to monitor the services that are responsible for. And, monitoring new stuff should be easy for an individual.
An Effective Dashboard
A good monitoring system should provide a single and unified dashboard which will display an effective overview of the entire system state. One alternative is Turn-key dashboards, but at the other end, it’s also important to create a system that motivates the people who understand how the system functions to curate significant collections of metrics.
Best monitoring systems always made in such a way that should be convenient and interact easily with the engineers. As per the function time period, engineers could make their code by observing the feedback status. If there is an outage, its first code has to transform to the dashboard for those services before attempting to SSH to the host which is associated with the suspect.
Great monitoring systems inspire and invite adoption. A monitoring system that requires coercion for using it is solving theoretical problems, predefined, rather than actual problems in usage that your team members have to fix.
Monitoring in the Software Development Lifecycle
Instrumentation rather than testing the operations would be preferable for the good performance of all your production applications. Instrumentation is an appropriate part of your application, and not an additional debugging text.
Therefore, the instrumentation is an authorised part of your application, and not the extraneous debugging text that can be loosely implemented with the absolute assumption that could be removed later.
Develop Rather Than Remodel
Most of the strong monitoring systems don’t require the periodical maintenance procedure. As they are continuously iterated by the engineers. Engineers add new metrics for instrumenting a new service to solve the looming problems with infrastructure. The team that makes measurements delete them if they observe that there is no longer use of it. In fact, collecting, visualizing new metrics and storing is much accessible that engineers append new metrics all the day.
So, it is mandatory that with the focus of data, look for the accuracy of the results, and with the engineers, it is required to fix the code of pieces to make the healthy monitoring system that could be an efficient tool and will evolve as per your organization requirements.
Prerequisites for Building Effective Monitoring Infrastructures
