monitoringitems

Monitoring items are discrete data points tracked by monitoring systems, representing measurable attributes of a host, service, application, or environment. They are the fundamental units used to observe performance, availability, and behavior. Monitoring items can take the form of metrics, events, or logs, and are identified by a unique key within a monitoring configuration.

Each monitoring item has characteristics such as a name, type (metric, event, log), data type (numeric, string), unit, collection interval, and collection method. They may also have thresholds, alert rules, status indicators, and metadata for context. Items are often organized into groups or dashboards and can be tagged to support filtering and aggregation.

Collection and processing methods vary. Items can be retrieved via agent-based collectors installed on endpoints or agentless approaches using protocols like SNMP, WMI, SSH, or HTTP APIs. Data is typically stored in a time-series database, with timestamps and normalized values that support visualization, querying, and alerting. Items feed into alerting engines and visualization tools, enabling operators to detect anomalies and respond promptly.

Lifecycle and usage involve discovery or manual addition, configuration of collection and thresholds, continuous data gathering, rule evaluation, and alerting with escalation as needed. Obsolete items may be archived or removed to maintain system efficiency and relevance.

Common examples include infrastructure metrics (CPU usage, memory, disk I/O, network latency), application metrics (request rate, error rate, latency), and security or cloud metrics (login attempts, API responsiveness). In practice, monitoring items underpin most observability and performance-management workflows, and are implemented in tools ranging from Prometheus and Grafana to Nagios and Zabbix.