Network Monitoring

Basics

Terminology

• Element - the fundamental unit of network monitoring, an element consists of a single metric that is being monitored. There are usually hundreds or thousands of elements in a given network.

• Acquisition - the process of actually obtaining the observational data from the element

• Frequency - related to acquisition, what is the frequency at which data arrives? what kind of data is being sent? under what conditions?

• Data warehousing - depending on the size of the network and the amount of data, you can end up with a big storage problem on your hands. For purposes of monitoring, you may decide not to store the data at all, you may decide to keep it for a short amount of time, or you may decide to archive it somewhere.

• Threshold - this gets into the "what" part of your monitoring. What, exactly, are you monitoring, and what is the value of the element that will trigger an alert? (What constitutes an emergency?)

• Reset - opposite of threshold, what is the value of the element that will un-trigger an alert and signify the "all clear"?

• Response - what is the response when a threshold is reached and an alert is triggered?

• Requester - the entity that is requesting the monitoring data, and where it lives (may be on-board the machine, or may be a networked data store)