Monitoring Requirements
There are several requirements for operational systems monitoring. These include:
• | Minimization of side-effects: Monitoring software should have negligible resource footprints, and should have a minimal effect on the performance of observed systems. |
• | Minimization of administration costs: Monitoring software should not be a maintenance burden, but a reliable beneficial tool, for the operations staff. |
• | Maximization of coverage: Monitoring software should monitor all the aspects of modern systems than are of interest to operations staff. |
Most monitoring systems follow the keep it simple mantra for implementing monitoring. They might collect data via logs into a centralized server where scripts can execute against the monitor data – traditionally log file records – to determine required actions. However, TIBCO Hawk’s designers anticipated some additional requirements:
• | Ability to handle distributed systems and very large networks of computers: with the transition from mainframe to client-server to distributed computing throughout the 1980s to 1990s and 2000s, more fault-tolerant monitoring systems were envisaged that would not require administration of centralized servers and specialized fault-tolerance mechanisms |
• | Ability to grow to new monitoring requirements with minimal system intervention: both new type of measurement and new source of measurements would be required as new types of hardware and software were/are deployed over time. |