Question : Problem: System monitoring - Essentials

Hi,
We have a system monitoring software, that can pretty much monitor anything.  We would to trim it down to only monitor the essential information, can anyone suggest other resources to monitor other than the system memory, CPU, free disk, network and application services?


Thanks,
 

Answer : Problem: System monitoring - Essentials

Aside from the above, I'd see if your monitoring solution can integrate with any of the services your servers are running to return domain-specific information about their behavior.  

If you're implementing the monitoring to attempt to provide performance information to help optimize configurations or custom applications and services, I'd add performance counters such as cache hits, page faults, and commit cost.  Might even go so far as to log every file (e.g., open, close, write, seek), registry (key opens, key creations, value creations and writes), and kernel operation (module loads and unloads, object creations, file opens, thread creation and desctruction) to get as much info as possible about the behavior of your systems at the OS level.

On the other hand, if you're using these to monitor performance just so you have indicators of whether there's a problem or advance notice of when you'll need to upgrade hardware to keep pace with load, the ones you listed initially should be fine, and the above would definitely be overkill that's likely to hurt a production system (by bogging it down) much more than it helps.