DX NetOps

What are some of the best practices for server monitoring?  Do you have any tips or tricks up your sleeve that you use every day? Share some your insights for the community as part of this thread. We will do a "aggregated" post latter and share these via our weekly monitoring tips tweet as well.

Hi Umair,

My experience is that this really varies as every customer has a different configuration, hence they all monitor different things for the most part. The CA eHealth Administration Guide (attached) provides relevant information on how to administer your configuration and helps you understand better the product which will allow you to monitor your servers more efficiently.

Please review the admins guide and use it as a reference. Also there is many more documentation on this that you can find in support.ca.com.

Hope this helps.

Bests,

Jose

Thanks Jose

Hey Umair, I believe one of the key's to effective server monitoring is creating a plan that is consistant, automated, and repeatable. Especially with the prevelence of cloud and virtualized resources our customers are using today, it's not scalable to manually configure monitoring everytime a server is provisioned, only to have it be deprovisioned hours or days later as needed.

Leveraging the template feature for AWS, or super packages and automated discovery as an example, enable tool admins to create consistant artifacts that can be used accross the organization. Granted there may be several templates in use, depending on the infrastructure/application running on the server, but creating a thuroughly documented and tested plan in this fashion, save's hours on the admin side, as well as gives the support team an expectation of what information they will be able to find on all servers.

thanks,

Skyler

Thanks Skyler.Cozad

It is a best practice to integrate monitoring tool and
service management tool because this process will increase efficiency, time to
resolution and customer satisfaction. Once the integration is in place, the monitoring
tool will alert network and systems admins of infrastructure issues and can
automate the process of creating a help desk ticket in the service management
tool. This process will allow the technicians to resolve the issues faster by
not having to log in to multiple tools to view tickets that has been assigned
to them.

Another key factor as to why this integration is a best
practice is the ability to auto route. Once these tickets are created on the
service management side, the tool can create rules as to whenever a ticket has
been generated from the monitoring tool to automatically push it to the right
technician. Auto routing will reduce the error of that specific ticket being
wrongly routed and will also speed up resolution for being submitted to the
right person automatically.