Monitoring and alerting may seem important in an IT organization, but they are a necessity. To achieve your company’s goals, it is essential to be aware of potential causes of downtime and how monitoring and alerting can be utilized to prevent such issues. Furthermore, according to Gartner’s estimate, downtime incurs a substantial cost of approximately $5,600 per minute for an IT firm.
For an organization to remain functional, DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, distributed systems, and cloud-native architectures have become some of the major, important elements. All these elements require real-time visibility. And while data collection may seem most crucial, monitoring and alerting are two things you’d not want to miss.
Why Is Monitoring Essential Today?
Monitoring has become more essential in today’s world than ever. This is mostly because of the dynamic nature of modern IT environments. Containers spin up and disappear in split seconds, deployment happens many times a day, and microservices should communicate in complex dependency chains.
Moreover, traditional monitoring systems can’t remain functional in the modern IT world. Monitoring helps provide continuous insights while collecting data on metrics, logs, traces, and events. You can better understand what’s happening across your stack.
Likewise, alerting is one such mechanism that notifies a team as soon as some kind of anomaly
is detected. So, what happens without monitoring and alerting? You won’t be able to detect performance degradations, failures will go unnoticed across services, and you will fail to address issues on time.
Take an example of a backend API that goes down at midnight. Your team will receive messages of customer complaints from the customer care department. That being said, hours of productivity will have been lost, and so will the customer’s trust.
GAP Analysis: we will identify and fill the gaps in your business
GAP Analysis is an activity that allows you to identify and fill emerging gaps in your business. Every enterprise
...
What Should Be Monitored in an IT Organization?
For effective observability, only checking the server uptime is not enough. Monitoring can be comprehensive as it covers both the technical setup and performance that is visible to users. A well-monitored IT environment has the following:
Applications and Services
- API Error Rates
- Service Latency
- Uptime and Availability
- Queue Lengths and Processing Times
Infrastructure
- Server Health (CPU, Memory, Disk)
- Network Throughput and Errors
- Database Response Times
- Load Balancer Traffic
Resource Usage
- Container and Pod Status in Kubernetes
- Auto-Scaling Activity
- I/O Bottlenecks and Disk Usage
Business Metrics
- Number of Logins per Minute
- Purchase Conversion Rate
- Page Load Times
- Abandoned Cart Rates
Top Monitoring Tools – Pros, Cons, and Use Cases
The following are some of the most popular monitoring tools in modern IT organizations:
Prometheus
Prometheus is best for mid to large IT organizations that use microservices. The main pros of Prometheus are that it’s based on a time series, promises great performance, and provides native Kubernetes support.
Grafana
Grafana is used for dashboarding and visualization. The pros of Grafana include good visualization and data source support, including Elastic, Graphite, and Prometheus. Further, Grafana is best suitable for companies that require insights visually.
Datadog
If you’re from a cloud-native startup or even a large company searching for an overall SaaS solution, then Datadog is the full-stack observability platform to rely on. The setup is easy and it ensures rich integration and cloud-native. However, the expense of Datadog can be a big con.
Zabbix
Zabbix is suitable for monitoring networks and infrastructure. It provides solid SNMP support and is free and open source. It is not UI-friendly. Hence, Zabbix may not be suitable for cloud-native startups.
New Relic
Enterprises that require tracking end-to-end performance can rely on a platform called New Relic. It is an enterprise-grade full observability platform that combines infrastructure, logs, APM, and artificial intelligence. The complex price modeling of New Relic can be a major back draw for IT companies.
Some other tools effective for monitoring include Sentry for tracking frontend errors, Nagios for legacy systems, AWS CloudWatch for AWS-heavy stacks, and ELK Stack for powerful log analytics.
Improving Business Efficiency with AI Process Automation
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized business operations by enhancing efficiency and accuracy. Consequently, process automation, which uses technology
...How to Effectively Implement Monitoring and Alerting?
If a monitoring tool is good for implementation, it’s good. Otherwise, it’s not. You can effectively implement monitoring and alerting in the following ways:
Choose the Right Metrics
You don’t have to monitor everything, but know what to monitor. Keep your focus on SLIs (Service Level Indicators) like error rate, throughput, and latency. You can also align with SLOs or Service Level Objectives. Mastering DevOps KPIs and Metrics can help identify key metrics.
Set Proper Alert Thresholds
Proper alert thresholds should be set while fatigue should be avoided with the use of multi-condition thresholds, the use of anomaly detection, and the creation of informational Vs. Critical alert levels.
The “You Build It, You Run It” Culture
Developers can best perform implementation when they are monitoring. That way, issues are resolved quicker, the quality of code improves, and the team becomes proactive. Checking The Real Impact of DevOps Culture can be of good help in this case. The cultural shift ensures agility in Google’s SRE Book.
Integrate Alerts with Communication Channels
To integrate alerts with communication channels, you have to use tools like Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or Slack. This helps streamline processes for escalation and alert routing. You should provide context within alerts to speed up resolutions.
Continuous Improvement
In order to improve thresholds and metrics, you need to conduct post-incident reviews (PIRs). SRE practices like reliability SLAs and mistake budgets should be used. Dashboard auditing and alerts should be regular. For proper incident response and PIRs, you can take a look at Future Code’s DevOps Playbook.
Open Communication Culture and IT Team Efficiency
While an IT team is majorly driven by code and logic, what often remains overlooked is the human
...
Conclusion – A Worthwhile Investment
While monitoring and alerting do not directly contribute to an IT company’s profit-making, they sure decrease losses and failures to a good extent. Additionally, your company remains ahead of the competitors with consistent application of monitoring and alerting. The IT applying monitoring and alerting can also remain stable and reputable in the long run.
When a proactive observability culture is followed, MTTR or mean time to recovery improves, downtime and other such costs decrease, and confidence across executive, product, and engineering teams improves.
Therefore, an IT organization should not only limit its business goals to setting them but also simply check on its team performance. The work should extend towards monitoring and alerting for productivity without or with the least losses.
Find some time in your calendar and schedule an online appointment.
Make an appointment
