Any application that consumes any kind of compute, storage, or network resources should be monitored. The term monitoring is commonly used in place of four separate features that allow us to get complete insight into the state of our applications:
- Resource usage metering
- System and application log collection
- Resource utilization graphing
- Alarming upon predefined trigger
We need to collect metrics and logs to be able to determine patterns of usage. The metrics, logs, and patterns will allow us to understand the resource consumption characteristics of an application, and once we have understood the way our application consumes resources, we can create alarms that are usually represented as certain thresholds, beyond which our application operates in an abnormal state.
Many monitoring systems are available as open source products or proprietary...