Monitoring refers to the practice of collecting regular data regarding your infrastructure in order to provide alerts both of unplanned downtime, network intrusion, and resource saturation. Monitoring also makes operational practices auditable, which is useful in forensic investigations and for determining the root cause of errors. Monitoring provides the basis for the objective analysis of systems administration practices and IT in general.

Collecting these data presents its own set of technological problems, and general purpose monitoring tools require a great deal of customization and configuration for most uses. At the same time, most specialized monitoring tools only collect certain types of data and must integrate into general purpose systems.

• Single system for monitoring both on premises and cloud-based infrastructure
• Vendor independent architecture. The manager should not be forced to select a monitoring system based on the equipment manufacturer and vice versa.
• Intelligent prioritization of notifications based on user-defined parameters.
• Ability to establish thresholds that trigger automated events. One example could be “when virtual server utilization reaches 80%, notify manager and provision additional virtual machines”
• Show real-time information on both individual components and the aggregate systems made up by those components.