Monitoring Stages, depth, and Maturity levels: Building a Resilient IT Monitoring Framework

The establishment of a well-designed monitoring tool setup in the IT environment is a multi-stage activity that involves a different set of requirements, which goes beyond installing the monitoring tools, initiating discovery, and enabling out-of-the-box features.

Below is a breakdown of the key stages:

Stage 1: Building the Foundation – Assets Inventory and Environment Awareness.

IT environment monitoring power gets its building blocks from the knowledge of the environment. The first stage is to have a proper asset inventory, including devices, IPs, types, roles (database, web server, etc.), deployment type (physical, virtual, cloud or on-premises), external or internal services like websites and APIs. Assets shall have defined criticality, and any other details that describe the environment, such as specific important services with major business impact.

Stage 2: Choosing the Right Monitoring Tool.

After collecting your environment details, it is time to choose a suitable monitoring tool to use. The right choice is a game-changer. If you are looking for a full, detailed guide on that, check out my previous blog post: How to choose the best monitoring tool for your IT infrastructure – Fingerprint in IT

Stage 3: Onboarding all assets for basic monitoring.

The third stage in establishing the monitoring is to onboard all those assets to the monitoring tool for their availability and vital health metrics, such as utilization of resources (CPU, memory, disk space, network, etc.), with established alerting criteria to alert on performance degradation.

Stage 4: Role-Based Monitoring.

The fourth stage is to move to the role-based monitoring, where you identify exactly what is there in each asset and what the parameters are that ensure that this role is doing its job, then you find ways to monitor those components. This activity spans across all domains and roles: OS level, network components, database, application components, services, etc.

Stage 5: Dependency Mapping and Service-Level Monitoring

The fifth stage is to identify the dependencies in your environment and start making links between the items being monitored. Such as having a complete flow of a service being monitored, or an end-to-end delivery of services that contribute to a major business line. Then, translating all these details to the monitoring tools for more targeted alerting.

Stage 6: Reporting and Dashboard

This stage is to get all the above details into well-designed periodic reports and dashboards that give immediate insights about the state of the monitored infrastructure. Therefore, helps in the decision-making process and continuous improvement.

The achievement of all the above stages can be simplified or assisted with specialized tools. However, ensuring that all data generated from them is accurate and proper by getting it revised through the IT environment experts and specialists will assure higher accuracy and control over the requirements and gathered data.

Maturity and evolution of the monitoring posture that leverages its benefit to the maximum is a result of a well-organized procedure and continuous development.