monitoringchecking

Monitoringchecking is a term used to describe the integrated practice of continuously observing system state and validating that the system meets predefined conditions. It fuses monitoring, which collects metrics, logs, traces, and events to characterize health and performance, with checking, which evaluates invariants, policies, and data integrity through automated validations and tests.

Key components include data collection systems, metrics dashboards, log aggregations, and tracing; a repository of checks or validation rules; alerting and incident workflow; and a feedback loop that tunes thresholds based on historical context and evolving requirements.

Implementation often occurs across multiple layers, from infrastructure and platforms to application code and data pipelines. Examples include health checks, service-level objectives with automated alarms, data quality checks in ETL processes, and security anomaly checks triggered by persistent patterns.

Benefits include earlier detection of failures, faster mean time to recovery, improved reliability, and better compliance reporting. Challenges involve balancing sensitivity and noise, maintaining up-to-date checks, ensuring data quality for monitoring, and preventing alert fatigue.

In related discourse, monitoringchecking sits alongside observability, reliability engineering, and governance practices. It is particularly associated with site reliability engineering, continuous delivery, and automated runbooks.