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Universal Monitoring Crimes and What to Do About Them - Part 2

Leon Adato

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

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

4. Flapping or sawtoothing alerts

When an alert repeatedly triggers (a device that keeps rebooting itself or processes keep deleting/creating temporary page files so that one moment it's over threshold, the next it's below, for example), that condition is known as flapping or sawtoothing.

What to do about it: These types of alerts have several possible resolutions based on what is supported by your monitoring solution and which best fits the specific situation:

■ GOOD: Suppress events within a window. Ignoring duplicated events within a certain period of time is often all you need to avoid meaningless duplicates.

■ ALSO GOOD: As mentioned previously, add a time delay to allow for self-resolution, avoid false-positives, and eliminate other potential issues that don't necessarily require a remediation response.

■ BETTER: Leverage "Reset" logic. Wait for a reset event before triggering a new alert of the same kind. Avoid making the reset logic merely the reverse of the trigger (if the alert is > 90%, the reset might be 90%). Instead, code the reset rules separately so that you might trigger when disk > 90% for 15 minutes, but it won't reset until it's 80% for 30.

■ BEST: Two-way communication with a ticket or alert management system. This is where the monitoring system communicates with the ticket and/or alert tracking system, so you can never cut the same alert for the same device until a human has actively corrected the original problem and closed the ticket.

5. No lab, test, or QA environments for your monitoring system

If your monitoring system is watching and alerting on mission-critical systems within the enterprise, then it is mission critical itself. But despite the fact that many organizations set up a proof-of-concept environment when evaluating monitoring solutions, once the production system is selected and rolled out, they fail to have any type of lab, test, or QA system that is maintained on an ongoing basis to help ensure the system is maintained.

What to do about it: Duh. Implement test, dev, and/or QA installations that serve to ensure your monitoring system has the oversight necessary for a mission-critical application.

■ TEST: An (often temporary) environment where patches and upgrades can be tested before attempting them in production.

■ DEV: An environment that mirrors production in terms of software, but where monitors for new equipment, applications, reports, or alerts can be set up and tested before rolling those solutions to production. And as mentioned earlier, this is the perfect place to also monitor your production monitoring environment.

■ QA: An environment that mirrors the previous version of production, so that if issues are found in production, they can be double-checked to confirm whether the problem was introduced in the last revision.

Note that I'm not implying you necessarily must have all three, but it's worth considering the value of at least one. Because "none" is a really bad choice.

Final thoughts

The rate of technical change in the data center today is rapidly accelerating and traditional data center systems have undergone considerable evolution in a very short period of time. As complexity continues to grow alongside the expectation that an organization's IT department should become ever-more "agile" and continue to deliver a quality end-user experience 24/7 (meaning no glitches, outages, application performance problems, etc.), it's important that IT professionals give monitoring the priority it deserves as a foundational IT discipline.

By understanding and addressing these top universal monitoring crimes, you can ensure your organization receives the benefit of sophisticated, tuned monitoring systems while also enabling a more proactive data center strategy now and in the future.

Hot Topics

The Latest

A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value reveals that enterprises are expected to significantly scale AI-enabled workflows, many driven by agentic AI, relying on them for improved decision making and automation. The AI Projects to Profits study revealed that respondents expect AI-enabled workflows to grow from 3% today to 25% by the end of 2025. With 70% of surveyed executives indicating that agentic AI is important to their organization's future, the research suggests that many organizations are actively encouraging experimentation ...

Respondents predict that agentic AI will play an increasingly prominent role in their interactions with technology vendors over the coming years and are positive about the benefits it will bring, according to The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience, a report from Cisco ...

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

Universal Monitoring Crimes and What to Do About Them - Part 2

Leon Adato

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

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

4. Flapping or sawtoothing alerts

When an alert repeatedly triggers (a device that keeps rebooting itself or processes keep deleting/creating temporary page files so that one moment it's over threshold, the next it's below, for example), that condition is known as flapping or sawtoothing.

What to do about it: These types of alerts have several possible resolutions based on what is supported by your monitoring solution and which best fits the specific situation:

■ GOOD: Suppress events within a window. Ignoring duplicated events within a certain period of time is often all you need to avoid meaningless duplicates.

■ ALSO GOOD: As mentioned previously, add a time delay to allow for self-resolution, avoid false-positives, and eliminate other potential issues that don't necessarily require a remediation response.

■ BETTER: Leverage "Reset" logic. Wait for a reset event before triggering a new alert of the same kind. Avoid making the reset logic merely the reverse of the trigger (if the alert is > 90%, the reset might be 90%). Instead, code the reset rules separately so that you might trigger when disk > 90% for 15 minutes, but it won't reset until it's 80% for 30.

■ BEST: Two-way communication with a ticket or alert management system. This is where the monitoring system communicates with the ticket and/or alert tracking system, so you can never cut the same alert for the same device until a human has actively corrected the original problem and closed the ticket.

5. No lab, test, or QA environments for your monitoring system

If your monitoring system is watching and alerting on mission-critical systems within the enterprise, then it is mission critical itself. But despite the fact that many organizations set up a proof-of-concept environment when evaluating monitoring solutions, once the production system is selected and rolled out, they fail to have any type of lab, test, or QA system that is maintained on an ongoing basis to help ensure the system is maintained.

What to do about it: Duh. Implement test, dev, and/or QA installations that serve to ensure your monitoring system has the oversight necessary for a mission-critical application.

■ TEST: An (often temporary) environment where patches and upgrades can be tested before attempting them in production.

■ DEV: An environment that mirrors production in terms of software, but where monitors for new equipment, applications, reports, or alerts can be set up and tested before rolling those solutions to production. And as mentioned earlier, this is the perfect place to also monitor your production monitoring environment.

■ QA: An environment that mirrors the previous version of production, so that if issues are found in production, they can be double-checked to confirm whether the problem was introduced in the last revision.

Note that I'm not implying you necessarily must have all three, but it's worth considering the value of at least one. Because "none" is a really bad choice.

Final thoughts

The rate of technical change in the data center today is rapidly accelerating and traditional data center systems have undergone considerable evolution in a very short period of time. As complexity continues to grow alongside the expectation that an organization's IT department should become ever-more "agile" and continue to deliver a quality end-user experience 24/7 (meaning no glitches, outages, application performance problems, etc.), it's important that IT professionals give monitoring the priority it deserves as a foundational IT discipline.

By understanding and addressing these top universal monitoring crimes, you can ensure your organization receives the benefit of sophisticated, tuned monitoring systems while also enabling a more proactive data center strategy now and in the future.

Hot Topics

The Latest

A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value reveals that enterprises are expected to significantly scale AI-enabled workflows, many driven by agentic AI, relying on them for improved decision making and automation. The AI Projects to Profits study revealed that respondents expect AI-enabled workflows to grow from 3% today to 25% by the end of 2025. With 70% of surveyed executives indicating that agentic AI is important to their organization's future, the research suggests that many organizations are actively encouraging experimentation ...

Respondents predict that agentic AI will play an increasingly prominent role in their interactions with technology vendors over the coming years and are positive about the benefits it will bring, according to The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience, a report from Cisco ...

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...