What is the purpose of monitoring infrastructure?

Preamble

What is application infrastructure?

Application infrastructure is all of the things, like networks, hardware devices, and servers, that make your systems and technology work. These things can be in the cloud or on-premises. The infrastructure is still based on a physical server somewhere, even if you’re using cloud solutions. Application infrastructure is like the foundation of a building; it supports the whole thing but isn’t seen.

The three layers that make up application infrastructure are as follows:

• Hardware: This layer is ultimately built on microchips, such as logic chips (CPUs) and memory chips (RAM), but there are also other types of chips, such as neural processing units (NPUs), which are intended for machine learning applications. It includes all of the physical servers, processors, network devices, and other physical devices that your system uses.
• OS: Operating system: The operating system executes applications while also using hardware resources such as CPUs and RAM, including virtual machines, which have their own operating systems. The operating system provides an interface that connects the two layers of application infrastructure: the hardware and the application itself.
• Application: The application layer also includes containers, which are used to run many applications, and the application itself, which could be a custom application you’ve created or an application that makes use of a content management system like WordPress.

You must consider each of these layers if you use on-premises servers, including making sure your hardware is in good working order. Because the infrastructure that hosts your software and applications is maintained by your cloud provider, you no longer need to worry about hardware in the same way when using cloud-based infrastructure. You must still consider provisioning resources, including CPU, memory, storage, and networking. Your application won’t operate properly if it is under provisioned, and if it is over provisioned, you’ll be wasting money on capacity that you don’t require.

Why is infrastructure monitoring important?

Infrastructure is the base of your systems, no matter if your applications use hosts in the cloud or on-premises (or both). Just like a train can only run on well-kept tracks, your system needs servers that work well and are reliable to make sure that services are delivered to your users. Your application’s performance suffers, and you may even experience outages when your infrastructure fails. Infrastructure upkeep can be difficult and stressful because the stakes are so high. Even if your servers are nearly always online, the occasional outages can still be very bad. Your authority and the trust of your users are impacted by outages and downtime. In the best case, your customers won’t be able to use your services, and in the worst case, they’ll get angry and leave.

Even though you can use the operating system’s command line to check a system’s CPU and RAM, you need a more complete solution to monitor the application infrastructure, especially as your applications get bigger and more complicated. Tools for monitoring infrastructure can help with that.

An integrated observability practice includes more than just monitoring your infrastructure. Observability is about collecting data from all of your systems, including your infrastructure, and sending alerts based on that data in a planned way. The platform you use should ideally keep an eye on your application’s performance as well as other features. So, you can find errors in your infrastructure and other parts of your applications and fix them.

Infrastructure monitoring advantages include:

• Rapidly identify and resolve infrastructure-related problems, including outages.
• Support the IT, engineering, and DevOps teams who depend on and work with application infrastructure.
• Giving customers a consistent, satisfying experience will benefit the business’s bottom line.

How does infrastructure monitoring work?

Infrastructure monitoring is similar to other types of monitoring in that it usually involves installing an agent on a host to make it ready for monitoring. With a monitoring solution, you can start the instrumentation process with a straightforward, guided installation. The agent automatically figures out what applications and log sources are running in your environment and tells you which ones you should instrument.

Once your hosts are fully instrumented, the agent will collect system data and send it to your infrastructure monitoring solution. Sometimes the agent will send data and logs, especially when the agent does the integrations. The agent will sometimes send data and logs forward. Infrastructure monitoring uses MELT data, including metrics, events, logs, and traces, just like other types of application monitoring.

Metrics, events, and traces are made up of metrics, events, and traces, which are all made up of logs. They consist of just one line of text. For example, a NGINX server will record each transaction that takes place. Events can include numerous lines of log information. Events give your infrastructure more context, along with traces that link related events together.

Metrics provide you with a high-level overview of what’s happening in your application because they are aggregated data. The typical latency of a service over the previous seven days is one example. Metrics give you a bigger picture and help you see how well your infrastructure is doing and how healthy it is as a whole.

About Enteros

​​​​Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It finds the root causes of complex database scalability and performance problems that affect business across a growing number of cloud, RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.