Individual tools matter less than having a coherent strategy. Your monitoring should answer questions that matter to the business.
Layer your approach:
Availability. Is it up or down? Ping and port checks.
Performance. Is it fast enough? Response time and latency.
Capacity. Will it handle growth? Utilization trends.
Security. Is it behaving normally? Traffic patterns.
Avoid mistakes:
- Monitoring everything without prioritization
- No testing of the monitoring system itself
- Unclear ownership of alerts
Monitoring requires ongoing tuning as your network evolves.