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Universal Monitoring Crimes and What to Do About Them - Part 1

Leon Adato

Monitoring is a critical aspect of any data center operation, yet it often remains the black sheep of an organization's IT strategy: an afterthought rather than a core competency. Because of this, many enterprises have a monitoring solution that appears to have been built by a flock of "IT seagulls" — technicians who swoop in, drop a smelly and offensive payload, and swoop out. Over time, the result is layer upon layer of offensive payloads that are all in the same general place (your monitoring solution) but have no coherent strategy or integration.

Believe it or not, this is a salvageable scenario. By applying a few basic techniques and monitoring discipline, you can turn a disorganized pile of noise into a monitoring solution that provides actionable insight. For the purposes of this piece, let's assume you've at least implemented some type of monitoring solution within your environment.

At its core, the principle of monitoring as a foundational IT discipline is designed to help IT professionals escape the short-term, reactive nature of administration, often caused by insufficient monitoring, and become more proactive and strategic. All too often, however, organizations are instead bogged down by monitoring systems that are improperly tuned — or not tuned at all — for their environment and business needs. This results in unnecessary or incorrect alerts that introduce more chaos and noise than order and insight, and as a result, cause your staff to value monitoring even less.

So, to help your organization increase data center efficiency and get the most benefit out of your monitoring solutions, here are the top five universal monitoring crimes and what you can do about them:

1. Fixed thresholds

Monitoring systems that trigger any type of alert at a fixed value for a group of devices are the "weak tea" of solutions. While general thresholds can be established, it is statistically impossible that every single device is going to adhere to the same one, and extremely improbable that even a majority will.

Even a single server has utilization that varies from day to day. A server that usually runs at 50 percent CPU, for example, but spikes to 95 percent at the end of the month is perfectly normal — but fixed thresholds can cause this spike to trigger. The result is that many organizations create multiple versions of the same alert (CPU Alert for Windows IIS-DMZ; CPU Alert for Windows IIS-core; CPU Alert for Windows Exchange CAS, and so on). And even then, fixed thresholds usually throw more false positives than anyone wants.

What to do about it:

■ GOOD: Enable per-device (and per-service) thresholds. Whether you do this within the tool or via customizations, you should ultimately be able to have a specific threshold for each device so that machines that have a specific threshold trigger at the correct time, and those that do not get the default.

■ BETTER: Use existing monitoring data to establish baselines for "normal" and then trigger when usage deviates from that baseline. Note that you may need to consider how to address edge cases that may require a second condition to help define when a threshold is triggered.

2. Lack of monitoring system oversight

While it's certainly important to have a tool or set of tools that monitor and alert on mission-critical systems, it's also important to have some sort of system in place to identify problems within the monitoring solution itself.

What to do about it: Set up a separate instance of a monitoring solution that keeps track of the primary, or production, monitoring system. It can be another copy of the same tool or tools you are using in production, or a separate solution, such as open source, vendor-provided, etc.

For another option to address this, see the discussion on lab and test environments in Part 2 of this blog.

3. Instant alerts

There are endless reasons why instant alerts — when your monitoring system triggers alerts as soon as a condition is detected — can cause chaos in your data center. For one thing, monitoring systems are not infallible and may detect "false positive" alerts that don't truly require a remediation response. For another, it's not uncommon for problems to appear for a moment and then disappear. Still some other problems aren't actionable until they've persisted for a certain amount of time. You get the idea.

What to do about it: Build a time delay into your monitoring system's trigger logic where a CPU alert, for example, would need to have all of the specified conditions persist for something like 10 minutes before any action would be needed. Spikes lasting longer than 10 minutes would require more direct intervention while anything less represents a temporary spike in activity that doesn't necessarily indicate a true problem.

Read Universal Monitoring Crimes and What to Do About Them - Part 2, for more monitoring tips.

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Universal Monitoring Crimes and What to Do About Them - Part 1

Leon Adato

Monitoring is a critical aspect of any data center operation, yet it often remains the black sheep of an organization's IT strategy: an afterthought rather than a core competency. Because of this, many enterprises have a monitoring solution that appears to have been built by a flock of "IT seagulls" — technicians who swoop in, drop a smelly and offensive payload, and swoop out. Over time, the result is layer upon layer of offensive payloads that are all in the same general place (your monitoring solution) but have no coherent strategy or integration.

Believe it or not, this is a salvageable scenario. By applying a few basic techniques and monitoring discipline, you can turn a disorganized pile of noise into a monitoring solution that provides actionable insight. For the purposes of this piece, let's assume you've at least implemented some type of monitoring solution within your environment.

At its core, the principle of monitoring as a foundational IT discipline is designed to help IT professionals escape the short-term, reactive nature of administration, often caused by insufficient monitoring, and become more proactive and strategic. All too often, however, organizations are instead bogged down by monitoring systems that are improperly tuned — or not tuned at all — for their environment and business needs. This results in unnecessary or incorrect alerts that introduce more chaos and noise than order and insight, and as a result, cause your staff to value monitoring even less.

So, to help your organization increase data center efficiency and get the most benefit out of your monitoring solutions, here are the top five universal monitoring crimes and what you can do about them:

1. Fixed thresholds

Monitoring systems that trigger any type of alert at a fixed value for a group of devices are the "weak tea" of solutions. While general thresholds can be established, it is statistically impossible that every single device is going to adhere to the same one, and extremely improbable that even a majority will.

Even a single server has utilization that varies from day to day. A server that usually runs at 50 percent CPU, for example, but spikes to 95 percent at the end of the month is perfectly normal — but fixed thresholds can cause this spike to trigger. The result is that many organizations create multiple versions of the same alert (CPU Alert for Windows IIS-DMZ; CPU Alert for Windows IIS-core; CPU Alert for Windows Exchange CAS, and so on). And even then, fixed thresholds usually throw more false positives than anyone wants.

What to do about it:

■ GOOD: Enable per-device (and per-service) thresholds. Whether you do this within the tool or via customizations, you should ultimately be able to have a specific threshold for each device so that machines that have a specific threshold trigger at the correct time, and those that do not get the default.

■ BETTER: Use existing monitoring data to establish baselines for "normal" and then trigger when usage deviates from that baseline. Note that you may need to consider how to address edge cases that may require a second condition to help define when a threshold is triggered.

2. Lack of monitoring system oversight

While it's certainly important to have a tool or set of tools that monitor and alert on mission-critical systems, it's also important to have some sort of system in place to identify problems within the monitoring solution itself.

What to do about it: Set up a separate instance of a monitoring solution that keeps track of the primary, or production, monitoring system. It can be another copy of the same tool or tools you are using in production, or a separate solution, such as open source, vendor-provided, etc.

For another option to address this, see the discussion on lab and test environments in Part 2 of this blog.

3. Instant alerts

There are endless reasons why instant alerts — when your monitoring system triggers alerts as soon as a condition is detected — can cause chaos in your data center. For one thing, monitoring systems are not infallible and may detect "false positive" alerts that don't truly require a remediation response. For another, it's not uncommon for problems to appear for a moment and then disappear. Still some other problems aren't actionable until they've persisted for a certain amount of time. You get the idea.

What to do about it: Build a time delay into your monitoring system's trigger logic where a CPU alert, for example, would need to have all of the specified conditions persist for something like 10 minutes before any action would be needed. Spikes lasting longer than 10 minutes would require more direct intervention while anything less represents a temporary spike in activity that doesn't necessarily indicate a true problem.

Read Universal Monitoring Crimes and What to Do About Them - Part 2, for more monitoring tips.

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...