Monitoring Principle

Univ of Hawaii - ITS Technical Architecture - Principle   

Monitoring

Principle

Monitoring refers to the ability to continuously track the status of an application, system, or program through the use of a pre-configured tracking/notification system.

If the successful operation of an enterprise application, system or program is important to the business of the University, it must be appropriately monitored by the Client Service and Operations Center (CSOC) such that ITS is made aware of failures, outages, slowdowns, and other events that adversely impact end-users.

Technical teams can choose to monitor some things themselves, but this should generally be limited to preventative-type monitoring, or can be in addition to CSOC monitoring.

For this principle security monitoring is not in scope.

General

Monitoring for ITS systems and services has been provided 7x24 by the Information Technology Operations Center (ITOC).  In summer of 2016, the new Client Service and Operations Center was formed, and it took on this responsibility for ITS.

Monitoring is usually done by continuously viewing a status screen or some other type of system.  Monitoring usually involves a relatively simple health check of a system. For example, can a system be successfully logged into, or can some simple operation be completed?

Before any new enterprise application, system, infrastructure component or program goes live, the technical leads should identify and address its monitoring needs and approach.  (Similarly, they should consider security, recoverability and other operational issues.)

Monitoring is generally only done for enterprise production systems, but non-production systems may be monitored too, though the response actions will be very different.

In order to accelerate response to key issues, technical teams may choose to also set up their own alerts to notify them of issues in addition to the monitoring performed by the CSOC.  Such notification systems should be closely coordinated with the ITS Incident Management process.

Change History

• Approved, April 2016

• Updated version under review June 2016