What is service monitoring?

Server monitoring involves the process of checking both physical and virtual servers. Service monitoring ensures secure performance and availability of your services and processes. Having a service monitoring system that adds value to your process is what you should consider when selecting a service monitoring tool.

Service monitoring has a set of central themes and terminology:

• Service-level indicator (SLI): Measurement of performance.
• Service-level objective (SLO): Statement of desired performance.
• Error budget: Measurement of the difference between the actual and desired performance. 

Service monitoring and the SLO API help manage services just like how Google manages its own services. The core concepts of service monitoring involve:

• Choosing metrics for your service-level indicators (SLIs);
• Making use of those SLIs and set service-level objectives (SLOs); and
• Lowering risk by using the error budget implied by the SLO in your service.

Why is service monitoring important?

Monitoring services prevent incidents and allow you to detect them at a faster rate. If you detect an incident fast or even prevent it from happening, as a result, you save time and money for the company. Without a monitoring system, it would take an enormous amount of time to realize there is a problem. And when you do realize there is a problem, it is usually from a user complaint which is something you want to avoid.

Service Monitoring Best Practices

Here are some general best practice guidelines for how to do service monitoring. These best practices will shorten the length and impact of outages and improve business results by preventing incidents from happening in the first place.

• Use a clear visual representation of your data that represents your servers;
• Implement detailed and actionable alerts with clear instructions for the receiver;
• Monitor from different resources simultaneously to eliminate false positives;
• Aggregate your server monitoring with resources who are competent;
• Utilize a robust tool instead of attempting to build your own system;
• Make use of alerts as opposed to relying on team members to log in themselves; and
• Avoid only using emails to send alerts because they get ignored often.

Benefits of Service Monitoring Tools

There are a variety of benefits when your organization enlists IT service monitoring tools. Service monitoring tools have the following benefits that include:

• Optimized cost-effectiveness by detecting issues immediately;
• Improved security protecting critical data and client information;
• Increased productivity with reduced risk of server failure;
• Fewer IT concerns; and
• Greater flexibility for your organization.

Read the blog, “Five Reasons to Make the Shift to Service Monitoring”>