In 2017, Amazon faced an unfortunate four-hour outage, causing S&P 500 companies to lose $150 million. What was the cause? An erroneous command removed more servers than intended, causing system downtime. Although downtime is not an alien topic for developers, its impact can be deeply felt. Gartner estimates the average cost of downtime to be as high as $5600 per minute, which may build up to over $300k per hour. These are definitely scary numbers for any organization.

But there’s no need to panic just yet!

Taking a few proactive and calculated steps can minimize the impact of downtime. A list of best practices for achieving this can include reviewing the test server backups, infrastructure maintenance, regular monitoring, and maintaining the stability and security of your devices.

Monitoring as a development practice is essential —  not just for preventing downtimes. It brings multiple other benefits to an organization and improves the processes for your development teams.

There are three major types of DevOps monitoring —  Infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, and network monitoring. In this blog, we will talk in detail about Infrastructure monitoring, its use cases, and best practices. Let’s start with a basic overview of infrastructural monitoring.

Infrastructure Monitoring: An Overview

An organization that relies on Information Technology for delivering its products and services requires setting up and maintaining an IT infrastructure. This infrastructure includes networks, servers, computer hardware/software, data centers, and storage. By monitoring the IT infrastructure, you can collect and examine information obtained from it and use the data to enhance final outcomes. It includes monitoring hardware, application, OS, and the network. Popular infrastructure monitoring tools include Prometheus, ManegeEngine, and Solarwinds. In simple terms, infrastructure monitoring ensures that organizations have —  

• The ability to optimize business processes by offering a splendid user experience.
• Prior detection and alert on outages and performance degradation.
• Offers scalability to handle planned and unplanned traffic spikes.

Infrastructure Monitoring Use Cases

This branch of DevOps monitoring ensures that organizations can rely on it for spotting and minimizing downtime and service degradation for users. Typically, infrastructure monitoring helps organizations by:

Troubleshooting performance issues —  You can leverage infrastructure monitoring to prevent service outages from escalating. An infrastructure monitoring tool can give you detailed insights that can show you which host, container, or component has failed. This will significantly reduce the turnaround time in issue resolution.

Optimize infrastructure use —  Optimizing your existing infrastructure using an infrastructure tool may help you financially. For example, if some of your servers are idle, you can eliminate them and distribute the workload on the remaining servers.

Forecast backend requirements —  By reviewing past infrastructural metrics, infrastructure monitoring tools can predict future resource requirements for optimal performance by reviewing past infrastructural metrics. This is beneficial as you can plan out your finances in advance. 

Must-Have Features in an Infrastructure Monitoring Tool

It is true that there is no tool in the market that is a universal fit for every organization. However, every tool must have certain essential features that will complement its other existing features. While choosing your infrastructure monitoring tool, look out for these particular features in them:

Cloud compatible —  If not today, then definitively tomorrow, you are going to switch to the cloud. Therefore, it is mandatory to pick a DevOps monitoring tool that is cloud compatible. 

Autoscaling supportive —  Autoscaling support is needed as when you will scale and put newer machines on the rack, they will start collecting data from the backend as they come online. There won’t be any need for added manual configuration. 

Customizable alerts —  Every infrastructure monitoring tool is designed to alert you when a key metric goes above or below a certain threshold. It is advisable to pick a monitoring tool that leverages machine learning to alert teammates when the latency rate is about to spike. This can help you sort out the issue even before it causes any harm.

Visualizations —  Nothing is wrong with having the most intuitive and user-friendly predefined dashboard. However, it is even cooler to have the option of making customized dashboards for monitoring the health and performance of your hosts and containers. 

Unified platform —  last but not least, you need to identify a monitoring tool that offers the feasibility of seamless integration between infrastructure metrics and other related traces, logs, and events. 

Machine learning —  Any tool based on machine learning analyzes historical performance to detect anomalies. By leveraging machine learning, you don’t have to manually set alerts for every possible failure. Such tools can also forecast CPU usage, memory usage, and other resources based on historical analysis.

Best Practices for Infrastructure Monitoring

Leverage automation —  Boost your productivity by augmenting your capabilities using automation. This will help you gain end-to-end observability.

Prioritize alerts —  Build a habit of organizations and set notifications for the most important alerts based on priority. 

Create role-specific dashboards —  Infrastructure monitoring tools gives your the accessibility to create custom dashboards as per your needs. You need to create boards based on various teams working in your organization. This will benefit them in monitoring their KPIs. 

Regularly review metrics —  As your business grows, your infrastructure will evolve, and your business goals will change with time. This will also change the metrics and KPIs you need to track. Therefore, reviewing them at regular intervals is crucial to avoid developing any blindspots across your infrastructure. 

Do a test run —  Before relying on an infrastructure monitoring tool daily. It is good to perform a test run to witness if everything is working as expected. 

Conclusion

Performance and optimization have become crucial factors for monitoring any IT infrastructure. As such, observability of performance is considered crucial. This can only be achieved through smart investment in infrastructure monitoring tools. I hope this blog guides you in taking the final step toward infrastructure monitoring. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the same, feel free to reach out to me in the comments section below.