Monitoring and alerting

Sun, 12 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Today is another rant day, or, to put it politely a clarification that needs to be made. As you probably know by now, I’m an infra/Ops guy. So monitoring has always been our core interest and tooling. There are many tools out there, some dating back to pre-cloud era, some brand new and cloud oriented, some focused on the application, some on the infrastructure. And with some tuning, you can always find the right one for you. But beware of a fundamental misunderstanding, that is very common : monitoring is not alerting, and vice-versa. Let me explain a bit. Monitoring is the action of gathering some information about the value of a probe. This probe can measure anything, from CPU load to an application return code. Monitoring will then store this data and give you the ability to graph/query/display/export that. Alerting is one of the possible actions taken when a probe reaches a defined value. The alert can be an email sent to your Ops team when a certain CPU reaches 80%, or it could be a notification on your IPhone when your spouse get within 50m of your home. Of course, most tools have both abilities, but that does not mean that you need to mix them and setup alerting for any probe that you have setup.

Monitoring on Cloudinthealps

Monitoring and alerting