6️⃣Monitoring

Centralised system to monitor the state, performance and events happening across infrastructure and application which sends alerts almost immediately when incidents occur.

End to end monitoring can help reduce infrastructure issues and downtimes by proactive identification of fault lines and bottlenecks in infrastructure. A centralised monitoring dashboard can ensure everyone from engineers to CXOs is on the same page when it comes to state of infra.

As the saying goes, seeing is believing, it is necessary to bring transparency into all activities happening in infrastructure through a robust monitoring system - a one stop station for monitoring all kinds of metrics and analytics, a centralised dashboard with metrics from

• Infrastructure resources - Network, System, Storage etc

• Applications - Frontend and Backend Services, Third Party Integrations etc

• Backend Services - Deployment state, health check, performance, latency etc

• Frontend App (Mobile)- Synthetics, Crash analytics etc

• Business - User activity, sessions, transactions etc

How to categorise Monitoring

What to Monitor:

• Infrastructure

• Application

• Services

How to Monitor:

• State

• Performance

• Events

Infrastructure Monitoring

State

• Health Check

• Uptime/Downtime

• Availability - Datacenter/AZ monitoring

• Connectivity - Intranet & Internet works

Performance

• CPU/Memory/Disk utilisation

• Network Bandwidth

• Peak hour Traffic

Events

• Authentication failures/Too many failed logins

• Unauthorised access

• Change Management

• Configuration Changes like FW rules

• Deployments

Application Monitoring

State

• Third party connectivity

• Integration

• Frontend to Backend Flow

• Truepath/Purepath for fault identification

Performance

• Crash analytics for mobile apps

• Performance tests

• Regression Tests

Events

• User activity/sessions

• Transactions

• Downloads

• Analytics Business

• Business metrics, conversions, behavior etc

Centralised Monitoring Dashboard

A one stop station that provides end to end pure path visibility of how each and every component involved in software delivery cycle is performing.

This monitoring system should be integrated to a centralised Identity provider that has role based access control and single sign on to provide secure user access.

Compliance of user data, localised caching, security, cloud service monitoring are some more factors that should be considered while selecting any monitoring system.

Things to consider for monitoring setup

• First responders need better dashboard where valid alerts are collected, monitored and acknowledged. Alerts must be sanitised and categorised to prevent spamming.

• It is ok to go with licensed monitoring tools provided it covers all the layers like infra, app, mobile, business etc and provided technical support and maintenance.

• You can use more than one tools but ensure all of them are integrated into one dashboard

• Monitoring Screens also help in cases on satellite service centers or during critical launches.

Summary

For a fault tolerant infrastructure you need robust end to end monitoring and alerting.

This can be achieved through a centralised system to monitor the state, performance and events happening across infrastructure and application which sends alert almost immediately when incidents occur.

This monitoring system should be integrated to a centralised Identity provider that has role based access control and single sign on to provide secure user access.