Friday, January 8th, 2010
Denise Dubie wrote a recent piece in CIO magazine about "5 Must-have IT Management Technologies for 2010", in which she identifies one of the must-haves as IT process automation. She quotes Jim Frey, research director at EMA: "On the monitoring side, automation will be able to keep up with the ...
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Monday, January 4th, 2010
We like monitoring. We like Java. Not to slight other languages - we like Ruby, perl, php, .NET and other platforms, too, and like to monitor them, also.
However, unlike most other languages, Java provides an explicit technology for monitoring applications and system objects. JMX is supported on any platform running ...
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Monday, December 21st, 2009
If your infrastructure has to be up at all times (or as much as possible), how to best achieve that? In an Active/Active configuration, where all parts of the infrastructure are used all the time, or in an N+1 configuration, where there are idle resources waiting to take over in ...
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Sunday, December 13th, 2009
It's still surprising to me that hardware and software manufacturers do not seem to value any kind of consistency in their management interfaces. Or maybe it's intentional, to complicate monitoring and management of their systems to encourage the purchase of the vendors own monitoring systems.
In any event, it makes the ...
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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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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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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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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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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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