How to provide robust monitoring to low-end systems.

As computing ecosystems become more complex, monitoring and analyzing those often disconnected moving parts becomes increasingly challenging. Today's data center has evolved from a single supplier producing and selling all-in-one offerings, such as the days when EMC, NetApp, HP or even Sun owned your data center and you chose a vendor and stuck with it. Those same vendors provided you with the required tools to monitor, analyze and troubleshoot their entire stack.

Pulseway provides a product of the same name that's built to enable IT personnel and give them the ability to monitor, manage and automate their systems and the tasks or applications that they host. And, the best part is that they can do all of these things anywhere and everywhere, from their pockets. In fact, I wrote about Pulseway once before, so check out that article for an introduction.

Five observations about why your server monitoring still stinks by a monitoring specialist-turned-consultant. Early in my career, I was responsible for managing a large fleet of printers across a large campus. We're talking several hundred networked printers. It often required a 10- or 15-minute walk to get to some of those printers physically, and many were used only sporadically. I didn't always know what was happening until I arrived, so it was anyone's guess as to the problem. Simple paper jam? Driver issue? Printer currently on fire? I found out only after the long walk. Making this even more frustrating for everyone was that, thanks to the infrequent use of some of them, a printer with a problem might go unnoticed for weeks, making itself known only when someone tried to print with it.

In 1935, Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, still flying high after his Nobel Prize win from two years earlier, created a simple thought experiment. It ran something like this: If you have a file server, you cannot know if that server is up or down...until you check on it. Thus, until you use it, a file server is—in a sense—both up and down. At the same time.

Let's talk about Amazon CloudWatch. For those fortunate enough to not be stuck in the weeds of Amazon Web Services (AWS), CloudWatch is, and I quote from the official AWS description, "a monitoring and management service built for developers, system operators, site reliability engineers (SRE), and IT managers." This is all well and good, except for the part where there isn't a single named constituency who enjoys working with the product. Allow me to dispense some monitoring heresy.

In today's IT world, staying on top of anything and everything related to the most mission-critical applications or machines is increasingly important. With this need in mind, Pulseway provides a product of the same name built to give IT personnel the ability to monitor, manage and automate these very systems and the tasks or applications that they host. Managing an entire computing ecosystem (consisting of both physical and virtual machines) never should be too difficult a task, and Pulseway has proven that to be the case.