12 Monitoring Tips for 2012
This list comes from my friend Steve Barger, a brilliant monitoring engineer as well as a gifted artist and webcomic author (You can read his weekly strip, “UpgrADe!” , here).
Looking ahead to the coming year, Steve has come up with 12 important items that anybody working with monitoring tools should keep in mind:
- Never monitor something that will never break.
- Going from Point A to Point B is always blocked by a firewall.
- To say that problems will not occur after you monitor them is bad karma.
- Give customers the opportunity to tweak their own monitors and alerts.
- You are the only support person between a customer and a 2am alert.
- Up on every good shelf is a manual…use it.
- Never underestimate the power of a false alert.
- Going into a meeting without knowing your customer’s monitoring strategy is unwise.
- To every system there is a threshold, to every customer there is a limit.
- Let the tools do their jobs efficiently so you don’t have to spend extra time on yours.
- You should never allow a good alerting opportunity pass you by.
- Down on paper or up on a whiteboard, strategies must be implemented to be effective.
Steve mentioned that more good advice can be found on this site.
