Monitor and Alert Systems II - Instrumentation Management

In the last blog, we touched on the basic concept of instrumentation. For effective performance monitoring and fault management, system administrators will require related information on infrastructure behavior and the correlation between services and infrastructure usage.

Instrumentation Manager (cont')

The Instrumentation Manager helps identify the elements associated with any given service when there is a disruption.

Instrumentation Manager produces two primary outputs:

• Service Level Data that consists of data sets and aggregated measurements that are forwarded to the SLA statistics system for statistical treatment and reporting on system performance
• Alerts that resulted from data escalated to the real-time event handler, where they are combined with other data for evaluation

Thresholds and Alerts

Instrumentation Managers is used to configure the instrumentation systems, from which it receive the measurement of data. They examine each incoming data item, filtering out the obvious measurement errors and comparing measurements to specified thresholds to see if an alert should be issued.

Event Manager

If measurements indicate a possible problem, the instrumentation manager may demand additional measurements to help make sense of the problem and to see if the original measurement was an outlier or was a true indicator of a difficulty.

That will be the role of the Event Manager, which we will discuss in next blog:)