We got a question internally about why one of our demo servers was slow, and how to use LogicMonitor to help identify the issue.  The person asking comes from a VoIP, networking and Windows background, not Linux, so his questions reflect that of the less-experienced sys admin (in this case). I thought it interesting that he documented his thought processes, and I’ll intersperse my interpretation of the same data, and some thoughts on why LogicMonitor alerts as it does…

At LogicMonitor, we know datacenter monitoring.  We know it because we’ve lived it – I’ve been that guy responsible for making sure that a 24 x 7 x 365 web service was up.  Most of our technical staff also came from a SaaS and web ops background (with lots of work in corporate IT worlds, too).

No matter the kind of database – Oracle, SQL server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc – there are distinct kinds of monitoring for the DBA.  There is the monitoring done to make sure everything is healthy and performing well, that allows you to plan for growth, allocate resources, and be assured things are working as they should.

IT people by nature are supposed to be gurus. They’re supposed to be able to build things from scratch. This expectation certainly applies to data center monitoring, where a common practice is to rely on open source monitoring tools such as Nagios.

If your infrastructure has to be up at all times (or as much as possible), how to best achieve that?  In an Active/Active configuration, where all parts of the infrastructure are used all the time, or in an N+1 configuration, where there are idle resources waiting to take over in the event of a failure?

One question that often arises in monitoring is how to define alert levels and escalations, and what level to set various alerts at – Critical, Error or Warning.