The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked

If you are interested in monitoring and successfully set up a system for your own use, there comes a moment when you go from watching systems that you care about, to monitoring systems that other people care about. This is where things get especially tricky. In your new role, you will find yourself answering certain questions repeatedly.

Over the course of 20 years as a monitoring specialist, I’ve come to think of them as “The Four Questions,” modeled after the four questions that are asked during the Passover meal, or Seder. Once framed in that context, I started to see other connections, lessons, and insights between the Passover Seder and IT generally, and monitoring specifically.

I’ve realized that successful monitoring solutions often address these questions up-front, while those installations which weren’t prepared for the four questions were often unsuccessful.

In this book, I describe the four common questions and their answers, and show how to structure your monitoring solution in order to answer the questions (and as a result, provide monitoring services) successfully.