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Not all alerts are created equal! Even though most response teams have adopted IT alerting practices, they are often far from monitoring and alerting best practices. It's not enough to just have an alerting system. If monitoring tools are left uncalibrated, alerts will simply produce a sea of noisy data. Instead, teams should calibrate alerts so that they are prioritized and meaningful.
Monitoring best practices An effective monitoring system is paramount to smooth business operations. As the need for a fast, responsive software experience gains momentum, monitoring becomes an indispensable driving force. Monitoring systems enable IT teams to proactively observe the health and responsiveness of critical environments and applications. Without monitoring, organizations must depend on customers or internal departments to receive notice of system issues. Metrics are raw data needed to monitor the performance, health and availability of key resources.
Organizations must define services that are crucial for business operations and establish metrics to monitor the specified technology. Thresholds are established for each key metric and alert triggers are created when threshold levels are crossed. When key systems are down, IT teams are alerted immediately without prolonging the incident.
Configuring monitoring alerts is an iterative process that requires full commitment from frontline personnel. Alert analysts must be encouraged to provide feedback on “white noise” to optimize alerts. Watchlists can be created and used to suppress false-positive alerts.
Severity-based alerting helps distinguish between high-priority and low-priority alerts. Some notifications can wait for a few hours until someone addresses the issue. These notifications are low-priority alerts and are not considered white noise.
No one wants to be woken up in the middle of the night by a pointless message, such as alerts that notify engineers of deployment problems in a test environment. Instead, ensure that alerts have contextual, meaningful information that needs to be investigated and resolved immediately.
Establish a baseline so you know how your systems are supposed to work.
We also define the Use Case of company operations, services, and functions to manage high and low-priority IT issues. Incidents that require a coordinated response from multiple teams require critical incident management.
Prometheus is an open-source system monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. Since its inception in 2012, many companies and organizations have adopted Prometheus, and the project has a very active developer and user community.
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