ITMonitoring

IT monitoring, or ITMonitoring, is the ongoing observation and analysis of an organization's information technology infrastructure and applications to ensure performance, availability, and security. It involves collecting data from systems, networks, services, and cloud resources and using that data to detect issues, forecast capacity needs, and inform operational decisions.

It covers multiple domains, including infrastructure monitoring (servers, storage, networks), application monitoring (web services, APIs, microservices), database monitoring, cloud and virtualization resources, and security monitoring (log analysis, anomaly detection, intrusion detection). Real-user monitoring and synthetic monitoring can be included to assess user experience and test availability from external locations.

Data sources include metrics (CPU, memory, disk I/O, latency, error rates), logs, traces, and events collected via agents, collectors, or cloud APIs. Techniques such as thresholds, baselines, alerting, and correlation are used to identify incidents. Outputs are dashboards, alerts, and tickets that feed into incident management and change processes.

Benefits include improved uptime and performance, faster detection of problems, informed capacity planning, and cost optimization. Challenges involve large data volumes, alert fatigue and false positives, integration complexity, and privacy concerns.

Governance typically aligns with ITIL incident and change management, while security monitoring follows SOC, SIEM, or NIST-inspired practices. Retention policies, access controls, and data protection are important. Common tools range from open-source options such as Nagios, Zabbix, and Prometheus to observability platforms like Dynatrace, New Relic, and Datadog, plus ELK/EFK stacks for log analysis.