June 9, 2008

“We started getting so many alerts we couldn’t tell what to pay attention to.”

Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, any IT monitoring effort can come with a snag: factory settings that are too high, too low, or just not applicable to your workload. Whether you are using commercial software or working with an open source or home-grown monitoring solution, over-notification can actually make you less productive and allow real, sometimes serious, problems to fall through the cracks.

If you are considering implementing a monitoring solution- or looking to improve what you are already doing- here are five common pitfalls and how you can avoid them.

1. Watch out for “one size fits all” thresholds.
Different workloads require different performance thresholds, and unless your monitoring software is tailored to your environment, you will end up with false alarms for applications where high utilization is the norm.

Save yourself from headaches by addressing this the first time you receive what might be considered an “over eager” alert. In Longitude, you can change settings right from the event monitor dashboard, as soon as you see the problem.

Click to enlarge (click enlarged image to focus)