Infrastructure monitoring: what to consider before designing
Monitoring has value when it is clear which is critical, what is the availability target a who reacts and how. Otherwise, it will become a source of noise and unnecessary interventions.
Monitoring only makes sense when it is clear which is critical, what is the impact and who reacts.
The minimum is to define the SLO, owner of alerts, escalations and runbook for triage.
Otherwise, alert spam, team fatigue and longer recovery time (MTTR) arise.
Key questions
- Critical Services: which services are the most important for the business and what is the impact of their outage?
- Objectives (SLO/SLA): what are the expectations for availability and response times?
- Response and Escalation: who deals with alerts, at what time and what is the escalation path?
- Runbook: is there a minimum procedure for triage (first steps, verifications, who to hand over)?
- What we monitor: service (end-to-end) vs. guests (CPU/RAM/disk) - what is relevant for you?
- Noise Reduction: severities, deduplication, dependencies, "quiet hours" and maintenance windows.
Practical approach
Start with a small number of alerts for critical services and infrastructure components that you can actually handle. Expand only when you have processes and feedback (what was useful and what was noise).
Monitoring without a runbook is just an alert — not the ability to consistently resolve an incident.