Published Date: October 12, 2022
Infrastructure monitoring is the process of tracking your IT systems’ health and performance. IT organizations implement specialized monitoring tools that collect and aggregate data from servers, virtual machines, containers, databases, applications and other components of their IT infrastructure. This data can be analyzed to provide visibility into the backend components that run the organization’s applications and can alert teams to any performance issues that may affect users.
Cloud-based infrastructure presents significant monitoring challenges. Serverless, container and microservice technologies spin up and down in seconds, making IT environments more dynamic and ephemeral. IT operations and cloud teams are tasked with monitoring and managing infrastructures but are often hindered by old and disjointed monitoring tools that weren’t built for cloud environments along with being impacted by the limited cloud infrastructure monitoring services from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers that can’t effectively monitor on-premises infrastructures. This makes it difficult for these teams to get the insights needed to understand the health and performance of their entire IT stack.
Infrastructure monitoring solutions are designed to more effectively monitor and troubleshoot modern infrastructures and applications. They provide visibility into multiple layers of the IT stack, including hardware, operating systems, data centers and applications. They can scale with dynamic cloud environments and provide visibility into technologies like Kubernetes, Docker containers, microservices or serverless architecture. And they are able to quickly detect and resolve issues across the entire spectrum of deployments including on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and multicloud.
Infrastructure monitoring can detect a range of problems including:
- CPU, memory and disk issues
- Network latency
- Application service degradation
- Anomalous or unusual activity
- Unauthorized access attempts
Infrastructure monitoring is essential for understanding infrastructure health and identifying and resolving performance issues. In the following sections, we’ll look at how infrastructure monitoring works, what systems need to be monitored and how you can get started with an effective infrastructure monitoring solution.
Why is infrastructure monitoring critical?
Infrastructure monitoring is important because infrastructure provides the foundation for your organization’s critical services. Infrastructure problems cause these services to suffer and may result in outages. Service degradation and outages damage your business’ reputation and users’ trust, and when severe enough, will drive customers away from your business for good. While performance issues can’t be avoided entirely, they can be minimized or mitigated with an effective infrastructure monitoring solution.
How does infrastructure monitoring compare to infrastructure management?
Infrastructure monitoring is a component of infrastructure management. Infrastructure management refers to the oversight of all the IT elements required to deliver an organization’s business services. Infrastructure monitoring is the process of collecting and analyzing data from those elements. By tracking the health of these technologies, infrastructure monitoring improves observability and provides the insights necessary to understand the current performance of the infrastructure as a whole and what actions need to be taken to optimize it.
In this way, infrastructure monitoring supports infrastructure management by providing the data needed to make decisions about managing capacity, improving uptime, lowering costs and addressing other IT-related business concerns.
What kind of infrastructure needs to be monitored?
Organizations should monitor all the IT infrastructure components that run their applications and services to ensure they work as expected and are available for end users. To better understand infrastructure monitoring, it can be classified into several intersecting subtypes. These include:
- Hardware monitoring: Hardware monitoring tracks the health and performance of all the physical components hosting your infrastructure. It uses sensors to collect metrics around device and environmental temperatures; CPU, memory, and disk capacity and usage; battery life data; and other factors that can impact your infrastructure’s overall performance. Monitoring these assets allows you to set performance parameters and be alerted when performance levels fail to meet expectations.
- Network monitoring: This process monitors for degradation of network performance, slow or failing components, and other potential issues. It employs a combination of techniques to continuously test the network’s functionality and the health of network components such as firewalls, switches, servers, and virtual machines. Network monitoring tools collect and analyze data for various network parameters, including availability, throughput, packet loss, and storage performance.
- Application performance monitoring: Application performance monitoring (APM) enables organizations to track the performance of their software applications to identify and troubleshoot issues that occur during development and runtime. It tracks metrics such as the user request rate, the number of transactions per second that the application processes and the total response time for each of those transactions, and error rates. It can also track factors – such as checkout time, the number of logins, and the frequency and length of downtime – to ensure the application meets the business’s required key performance indicators (KPIs), service level agreements (SLAs), and service-level objectives (SLOs).
- Database monitoring: Database monitoring tracks the health and performance of the databases that power your organization’s business-critical apps and services. Tracking metrics such as response time, throughput, open connections, errors, and most frequent queries can help you better understand your databases’ behavior and allow you to identify and fix problems before they compromise application performance and impact users.
What are the different methods for systems and infrastructure monitoring?
There are two methods for monitoring your systems and infrastructure: agent-based monitoring and agentless monitoring. Each has its pros and cons.
As its name indicates, agent-based monitoring requires the installation of a piece of software, called an agent, on remote hosts. Hosts can include physical servers (such as Linux or Microsoft machines), virtual machines (such as VMware or Hyper-V), or other system components. The agent collects data from the host and sends it back to the monitoring platform to be aggregated, analyzed, and visualized.
Agentless monitoring doesn’t require a separate software agent. Rather it relies on protocols that are already installed on your hardware and applications such as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Secure Shell (SSH) protocols and NetFlow to collect metrics for the monitoring platform.
Because an agent is installed directly on the host, agent-based monitoring typically offers richer data collection than agentless monitoring and makes it easy to automate diagnostics and remediate, relieving operations of this burden. However, agent-based monitoring takes more time to deploy and maintain and uses more device resources from the system on which the agent is installed.
Without an additional software requirement, agentless monitoring is more lightweight and less intrusive than agent-based monitoring. Also, the use of protocols like SNMP and WMI generally indicates the monitoring provider is agnostic, enabling more flexibility in heterogeneous environments. It's also often the only option for specialized hardware on which you can’t install an agent such as routers, switches, and load balancers. The main drawback of agentless monitoring is that it is heavily network-dependent and is likely to fail if the network does.
Both methods are valid options for most organizations because complex modern infrastructures usually require some balance of agent-based and agentless monitoring. Agent-based monitoring is well suited for endpoints and other devices that periodically disconnect from the corporate network, for example, as it doesn’t require a constant network connection to operate. Agentless monitoring is ideal for legacy systems, network devices on which you can’t install an agent, and devices with significant resource constraints.
Agent-based monitoring and agentless monitoring are two methods for monitoring your systems and infrastructure.
What are the benefits of infrastructure monitoring?
Infrastructure monitoring offers several benefits, including:
- Shorter MTTI, MTTR and MTTD: Even a few minutes of performance degradation or downtime can damage your company’s revenue, reputation, and customer satisfaction. It’s critical to be able to detect, identify, and resolve problems as soon as they arise. The real-time insights provided by infrastructure monitoring enable you to respond to and fix issues and restore workloads before they affect customers, improving user experience.
- Streamlined workflows: The volume and velocity of data generation from IT systems have outpaced manual processing capabilities. Human operators can’t correlate this data with the necessary speed and accuracy to produce actionable insights. Infrastructure monitoring solutions employ built-in AI and machine learning that can aggregate, process, and consolidate massive volumes of system and source data in seconds. These integrations lead to actionable insights that allow teams to optimize resource utilization; stay on top of system health and react instantly to problems.
- Predict problems and outages: With instant access to vital system data and stats, teams can identify trends and patterns, and leverage them to predict future performance degradation and outages. Teams will be able to anticipate system issues and address them before they compromise performance and impact customers.
- Spot and respond to security threats: A deep understanding of the IT infrastructure enables teams to recognize suspicious activity such as unusual traffic spikes, unfamiliar devices, uncharacteristic user behavior, and so on. This positions them to take proactive measures to discover root causes, mitigate security threats and prevent data breaches.
- Leverage data from across your IT environment: Traditional monitoring tools were designed for on-premise systems and are often unable to scale in dynamic cloud environments or effectively monitor cloud technologies like containers, microservices, or serverless environments. Infrastructure monitoring solutions can use real-time data from the full spectrum of deployments — including on premises, public, private, hybrid and multiple clouds — and can scale as demands change and IT environments evolve. This provides comprehensive monitoring across the entirety of the IT infrastructure, leveraging data from any source and at any scale.
What are the challenges of infrastructure monitoring?
IT teams have to deal with some common challenges when monitoring their infrastructure. These include:
- Size: Infrastructures grow in step with organizations, so IT teams are tasked with keeping track of and monitoring a continuously expanding array of servers, devices, and applications. The challenge is exacerbated by the globally distributed nature of modern IT ecosystems; teams have to deal with network, hardware, server, and code issues spread across the world. That makes it critical to use an infrastructure monitoring solution that can leverage metrics and logs from distributed systems and scale as needs dictate.
- Legacy tool limitations: Traditional monitoring tools often aren’t capable of scaling in dynamic cloud environments or effectively monitoring emerging cloud technologies, which leads to blind spots and inaccurate analytics. Only a modern infrastructure monitoring tool can provide the necessary flexibility and scalability to monitor these dynamic IT environments.
- Data limits: As infrastructure grows, so does the volume of data it generates. Monitoring tools that take a one-size-fits-all approach to IT architecture often can’t keep up with growing data volumes, leading to bottlenecks that compromise performance analytics. Modern infrastructure monitoring solutions are capable of processing massive volumes of real-time data in seconds to produce analytic insights and can easily scale along with your data needs.
What are infrastructure monitoring best practices?
Some infrastructure monitoring best practices include:
- Establish and prioritize notifications: An organization’s IT infrastructure generates huge amounts of data each day in the form of event logs, and it’s impractical and unnecessary to process all of them. To monitor your infrastructure effectively, configure your monitoring tool to only deliver notifications of specific types of events and prioritize those that require urgent action such as server outages and potential security breaches. This will ensure teams can respond swiftly and effectively.
- Schedule a test run: A real emergency is not the time to find out your alert system isn’t functioning as expected. A planned trial will allow you to determine if it needs some fine-tuning.
- Review your metrics: Regularly check the performance metrics you used to configure your alerting system. The thresholds you set initially likely won’t stay stable over time. Periodic reviews will allow you to determine if changes need to be made to your alert configurations to ensure optimal performance.
- Customize dashboards for each role: Infrastructure monitoring software uses dashboards to present data analytics in easy-to-digest visualizations. These dashboards can be configured to provide different types of information. To use them most effectively, customize dashboards for each role to get the right data to the right people. A security dashboard, for example, would allow IT security analysts to see anomalous activity that could signal a potential security breach while a DevOps dashboard would enable software developers to track mean time to recover, deployment frequency, and code change volume.
- Use your vendor’s support services: Most vendors offer consultants, help centers and other support. They can help you configure your infrastructure monitoring solution, answer questions about functionality, and help troubleshoot and resolve problems. Take advantage of these services to ensure you get the most business value from your investment.
Infrastructure monitoring best practices can set you up for business success.
What should you look for in an infrastructure monitoring solution?
The first step to getting started with infrastructure monitoring is determining your needs and objectives — for your team and for the enterprise as a whole. Then, you should start looking for an infrastructure monitoring solution that fits within your pricing requirements — there are both paid and open source solutions available. You should look for the following features when evaluating infrastructure monitoring tools:
- A unified platform: A unified infrastructure monitoring platform breaks down the silos between operations and development teams and provides end-to-end visibility across the entire tech stack.
- Cloud-native support: An infrastructure monitoring tool should be able to integrate with third-party cloud providers and orchestration tools and provide support for containers and serverless architecture. It should also support open standards such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, StatsD, and Telegraf.
- Tagged metrics: Tagging your metrics with applicable metadata is essential when monitoring large, distributed IT infrastructures. Tags allow you to aggregate metrics across your infrastructure at any level you need, such as hardware profiles, software versions, availability zones, services and so on. This allows you to target segments of your IT stack, such as a particular service or hardware component that is experiencing issues.
- Customizable alerts: An IT infrastructure monitoring tool should allow you to set thresholds for critical metrics and alert you when they fall out of line. Some tools will also let you set machine-learning-based alerts that will notify teams when a host’s latency is trending higher than usual, for example, so that they can respond proactively and prevent a system failure.
- Data visualizations: Most modern infrastructure monitoring systems provide pre-built dashboards and allow you to customize your own. These dashboards display data analytics in easily understood visualizations. You should be able to tailor dashboards and monitoring capabilities to individual roles, such as operations or security, so that each team gets only the information they need to do their job effectively.
- Machine learning: Built-in AI and machine learning allows infrastructure monitoring tools to process massive volumes of data quickly and accurately. While this helps detect issues in real time, it also enables the tool to learn from past infrastructure performance to identify patterns and trends. With this information, the tool can use automation to forecast future performance and even predict performance degradation so that teams can get ahead of critical issues.
The complexity of IT infrastructure demands that you monitor your hardware, cloud technologies, and applications in real time — no matter where they’re deployed. Machine learning-enabled infrastructure monitoring solutions provide the flexibility and scalability to ensure that all your IT systems are operating as optimally as possible and that they’ll continue to do so as your needs and systems evolve.
