System Monitoring - Overview

Overview

The argument that system monitoring is just a nice to have, and not really a core requirement for operational readiness, dissipates quickly when a critical application goes down with no warning. The configuration for the system monitor takes two forms:

1. configuration data for the monitor application itself, and
2. configuration data for the system being monitored. See: System configuration

The monitoring application needs information such as log file path and number of threads to run with. Once the application is running, it needs to know what to monitor, and deduce how to monitor. Because the configuration data for what to monitor is needed in other areas of the system, such as deployment, the configuration data should not be tailored specifically for use by the system monitor, but should be a generalized system configuration model.

The performance of the monitoring system has two aspects:

• Impact on system domain or impact on domain functionality: Any element of the monitoring system that prevents the main domain functionality from working is in-appropriate. Ideally the monitoring is a tiny fraction of each applications footprint, requiring simplicity. The monitoring function must be highly tunable to allow for such issues as network performance, improvements to applications in the development life-cycle, appropriate levels of detail, etc. Impact on the systems' primary function must be considered.
• Efficient monitoring or ability to monitor efficiently: Monitoring must be efficient, able to handle all monitoring goals in a timely manner, within the desired period. This is most related to scalability. Various monitoring modes are discussed below.

There are many issues involved with designing and implementing a system monitor. Here are a few issues to be dealt with:

• configuration
• protocol
• performance
• data access