Monitoring is not a new concept, but a lot has changed about the systems that need monitoring and which teams are responsible for it. In the past, monitoring used to be as simple as checking if a computer was still running. Dave Charles, chief technology officer of Cobe.io, remembers monitoring as simple instrumentation that came alongside a product.
As James Turnbull explains in “The Art of Monitoring,” most small organizations didn’t have automated monitoring — they instead focused on minimizing downtime and managing physical assets. At companies that actually had IT staff, operations teams used simple tools to check on disk, central processing unit (CPU) and memory usage, but focused mostly on dealing with emergencies related to availability. Larger organizations eventually replaced the manual approach with automated monitoring systems that utilized dashboards. The common thread for all these organizations was that being able to read and receive metrics meant that the service was operational.
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