Why CPU load should not (usually) be a critical alert.

Friday, November 20th, 2009

One question that often arises in monitoring is how to define alert levels and escalations, and what level to set various alerts at - Critical, Error or Warning.  Assuming you have Errors and Critical alerts set to notify teams by pager/phone, and Critical alerts with a shorter escalation time, here ...

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Top I.T./Datacenter Monitoring Mistakes, Part 4 in a series.

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Monitoring System Sprawl This is often a corollary to the first point, not relying on manual processes.  The number of monitoring systems you have in place should approach 1.  You do not want one system to monitor windows servers; another for linux, another for MySQL, another for storage.  Even if they ...

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Top I.T./Datacenter Monitoring Mistakes, Part 3 in a series.

Friday, November 6th, 2009

Continuing on the series of common Datacenter monitoring mistakes... Alert overload This is one of the most dangerous conditions.  If you have too many noisy alerts, that go off too frequently, people will tune them out - then when you get real, service impacting alerts, they will be tuned out, too.  I've ...

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Top I.T./Datacenter Monitoring Mistakes, Part 2 in a series.

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Continuing on from Part 1 No issue should be considered resolved if monitoring will not detect its recurrence. Even with good monitoring practices in place, outages will occur.  Best practices dictate that the issue not be considered resolved until monitoring is in place to detect the root cause, or provide earlier warning. ...

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Top I.T./Datacenter Monitoring Mistakes, Part 1 in a series.

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Everyone knows they need monitoring to ensure their site uptime and keep their business humming.  Yet many sites still suffer from outages that are first reported by their customers.  Here at LogicMonitor, we have lots of experience with monitoring systems of all kinds, and these are some of the most ...

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