So getting back to having fun …
I recently wrote a white paper (turned into a 4 part series by our Marketing team) on “What is monitoring?” – as i often find in monitoring, as with all infrastructure and detailed areas – we often overlook the basics.
We often go in and talk about dashboards, reports, automation in monitoring, rather than “Woah woah, what is a ‘service check?'” – similarly in SAN’s, we used to talk about “file system level replications, block level replication, using GFS” before actually talking about “well what is a block? what is a LUN?”. The foundations are always the most important part – and it is paramount to understand them fully before you can truly appreciate the more complex items.
I’ve added link here to all of the posts in sequential order. I tried to write them fairly vendor neutral – as there is nothing that i hate more than the “You need to learn what a computer is? Well a computer runs Windows” branded sales spiel – however, as i do work for a monitoring company, some of it does come across in my examples – so apologies if you are offended 🙂
What is monitoring part 1: Laying the foundations:
What is monitoring part 2: Interpreting the data:
What is monitoring part 3: Problem automation:
What is monitoring part 4: Operational automation:
I really do hope you find these informative. The principles do transcend the technology, i.e. you can take what you learn above to pretty much any other monitoring tool, they all conform to the same general principle.
Sam
