Interestingly, many analytics systems are ridiculously flexible and capable, and can do nearly arbitrary stuff to data. I haven’t seen that work well, and usually a bit of clear thinking about a “proactive monitoring system” shows it isn’t proactive at all.Īnalytics is the activity of turning data into answers. “I set up proactive monitoring to tell me when the disk is 95% full.” (That just sounds like monitoring to me, no adverb needed.) Others think proactive monitoring should mean the ability to detect problems before they happen, so they can act proactively to prevent them. Some people think this means the monitoring system is proactively configured to look for a symptom, e.g. There’s a special place in my heart for the term proactive monitoring. These (and literally a score of other things) are often convenient to have within a single tool, but that does not make them monitoring. Monitoring systems are often assumed to do so, so much more: take action to remediate, store historical data, perform capacity planning, manage notifications and escalations, etc. Monitoring and monitoring systems are separate. A human can monitor a system just as well as a monitoring system does. It may not be obvious, but monitoring doesn’t have to be automated. The activity of monitoring includes at least exposing the system’s status to any person or other system who may wish to observe it and possibly actively communicating the status. If the system’s behavior is within bounds, it is healthy if out of bounds it’s unhealthy. Monitoring is the activity of observing a system in the present tense and testing its behavior against an existing definition of correct or acceptable. Rather than talk about what it’s not, though, I’ll talk about what it is, or what it properly should be if it hadn’t been convenient to market it as something other for the last three decades. It’s so simple, but it’s ended up being stretched to cover a very large scope of things that, if you think about the root meanings of the words, is just not monitoring. Monitoring is one of the most lamentably mangled terms in tech. Root cause analysis is corporate mumbo jumbo.

Diagnostics is the process of determining what’s wrong with a system, and also relies on observability. Observability is the property of a system that supports analytics. Analytics is the process of turning data (usually behavioral data) into insights. TL DR: Monitoring is the process of observing systems and testing whether they function correctly. They asked me to elaborate, and I told them I’d write it up. I draw distinctions among these topics and my audience was not clear on why. I was speaking with some folks recently about monitoring, diagnostics, analytics, observability, and root cause analysis. It’s amazing how many times I’ve seen people frustrated with each other because they mean different things when talking about these words.

I know, because I’ve seen it happen many times. The result is that several people can be engaged in an earnest conversation about monitoring and, despite efforts to get each other to see what they mean, remain on totally different wavelengths.

The term now carries decades of inaccurate and imprecise use. Monitoring is a hopelessly overloaded term in tech culture.

Solarwinds monitoring tool images