Not all monitoring is created equal: what we mean by IT monitoring

IT monitoring means different things to different people, but at its core, it’s about staying in control of your infrastructure. Effective IT monitoring is not a single task, but rather a collection of interconnected processes that work together to keep your systems reliable, efficient, and secure. That’s why choosing the right monitoring platform is so critical. A platform isn’t just a tool, it is an ecosystem of capabilities that guide you toward your monitoring goals.

The choice for a monitoring platform should be directed by the demands of your infrastructure, but all too often, these are either misunderstood or inflated. We’ve heard companies claim, “We monitor with Grafana” or “We just use CloudWatch.” These answers miss the mark. Grafana is a powerful visualization tool, but it has limited capabilities for collecting and processing metrics. CloudWatch excels at AWS environments, but what happens when your infrastructure spans beyond AWS? Tools like these are not enough, especially if you aim for a holistic monitoring approach, as we always advocate.

That’s why IT monitoring needs to be more than just piecemeal solutions. It needs to align with a clear vision. For us, effective IT monitoring is comprehensive, adaptable, and built for diverse environments. Today, we’ll share our perspective on what defines true IT monitoring and why it matters for businesses of all sizes.

Most would probably say that IT monitoring is the monitoring of your IT infrastructure. Whether you work with a cloud-based, on-premises, or hybrid environment, it is always IT monitoring.

But does your concept of IT monitoring include database monitoring? Network monitoring? Functions that enable you to do proactive monitoring, like synthetic monitoring?

Surely many IT monitoring platforms include many, and even all, of these. But do they also come with features like dashboarding, or notification handling? These may be considered a separate part of IT monitoring, something that comes in second place after collecting the right metrics and being able to monitor all the hardware and software you need.

In truth, we believe that IT monitoring should encompass all of this. Monitoring is not simply visualizing metrics, nor only the collecting part, and no monitoring tool should do without a robust and flexible notification system to know what's wrong at the exact point in time when it goes wrong.

There are many reasons for adopting this approach to IT monitoring, some of which we want to discuss in more detail.

No system is equal to another. Nor is one infrastructure built and run exactly the same way as another. Thus, you need to have a solution that is apt to your needs and flexible enough to keep up once these needs change. Checkmk is a standalone IT monitoring solution that comes with everything: a modern core, monitoring agents, notifications, graphing, an API, and advanced features like synthetic monitoring. That is a whole package, at first glance too much for some. But bear with us.

You may be content to pull data from Prometheus into Grafana. Does that include all your future assets? Private and public clouds, for example? Or a customizable alerting system that will not inundate you with false positives? How is your SNMP monitoring coverage? You may not need it now, but one day you could face an infrastructure with switches that can only be monitored with SNMP.

Or maybe you are not doing proactive monitoring yet, but will eventually. Then the synthetic monitoring add-on will be a boon.

There are plenty of technologies and processes that you may not need today but can become important tomorrow. Having a complete IT monitoring system is of paramount importance in order to be ready for any future use case.

You needn't even fully switch right now. You can integrate Checkmk with services you use already. For example, you can connect Checkmk with Grafana and keep using the dashboarding functionalities of the renowned open source platform. But it is key to think beyond what you have now, include what you may use on the horizon, and have a monitoring software that is future-proof. The advantage of not having to switch multiple times and having a single product with lower total resource usage is invaluable as it saves time and money.

If your monitoring platform is feature-complete, today and tomorrow, you have one less component of your tech stack that you have to worry about.

There's no need to use a cannon to shoot a fly, as the adage goes, and that is true with IT monitoring as well. Capacity planning may be hard but nonetheless you do not need a real monitoring solution just to check the uptime of a Minecraft server.

An extreme example, true. However, the core message is that you should choose the right monitoring solution for your IT monitoring needs. You would waste resources, spend more, and increase overall complexity without tangible returns. Not everything has to be a Kubernetes cluster and similarly not every monitoring need is answered with a bulky, "real" monitoring software.

Aim instead for scalability. Unless you are a truly tiny company with 3 servers in a garage (if they even exist anymore), you would do well to have a monitoring solution that follows you, scaling down and up with your infrastructure.

Checkmk can be free forever, totally open-source with the starting edition, the Checkmk Raw. Or it can give you more power, more flexibility, and more coverage while only charging you per service. Checkmk scales together with your infrastructure – on-premises, cloud, or hybrid. We believe in giving you the flexibility to run as many services as you need, wherever you need them. IT monitoring shouldn’t be limiting. Checkmk reflects this, seamlessly adapting to your necessities.

IT monitoring does not have to be overly complex. It should be feature-rich, complete, and holistic, but not necessarily hard or time-consuming to set up. After all, the time you spend setting up your monitoring is time not spent monitoring.

Once everything is set up, you should be notified of any errors, crossed thresholds, and service interruptions as soon as they occur. IT monitoring has to have a robust alerting system and customizable notifications to reach your experts wherever they are and however they prefer. Constantly polling the monitoring agents and immediately receiving a notification when something needs to be reported is an essential feature in a proper IT monitoring system. If you have to look yourself or get delayed notifications, you may miss key events and end up with disruptions that could have been avoided with a single, timely, alert.

With Checkmk, we have combined all these elements. It is very easy to set up, and contains sane predefined thresholds and automatic discovery of hosts and services. This way, you won’t have to spend a large amount of time to achieve a working monitoring system. The exact status of your IT is visible in one second-intervals, since a granular alerting system is key to ensuring your experts know the pulse of the IT infrastructure. Troubleshooting gets easier the more up-to-date your metrics are, which are clearly displayed in customizable dashboards. Ideally, you should be able to tell at a glance what's wrong in most cases, and that's what Checkmk dashboards and rapid alerts are for.