Event Monitoring

CategoryArchitecture Component

Event Monitoring is the process of collecting system activity data, such as application usage or performance metrics, and delivering consolidated reports and critical alerts to visual dashboards and human operators. It helps convert system statistics into business meaning.

Component Overview

Early Problem Detection and Prevention

Event Monitoring makes use of application logging, data recording and distributed messaging to transport event occurrences from sources to subscribers. Event objects are often instrumented with event sensors that signal event occurrences in case of alteration in system behavior or state. After the collected data is processed by Event Analytics tools, the results can be sent to an administration console or user communication channels.

The process of Event Monitoring uses a number of techniques to collect event data and report system state:

  • Metric Collection — gather and centrally store metric data from remote system components.
  • Transaction Profiling — trace the flow of end-user or system requests across architecture tiers.
  • Event Distribution — deliver event data to system subscribers for recording and analytical processing.
  • Data Visualization — display the results of analytical processing on operational dashboards and reports.
  • Operator Alerting — notify system administrators of a critical state or issue occurring in the system.

Without monitoring, there is no information about historical, current and statistically-projected future system activity, such as infrastructure exhaust, application outage or security breach. Various event sources within an IT environment already provide such information. Diversity, volume and frequency of event occurrences are characteristics that explain why Event Monitoring discipline requires specialized tooling to deliver business value.

Monitoring in the cloud environment is essential to maintain system availability and performance, and is important for both service providers and service consumers. It is a key tool for managing software and hardware resources, and providing continuous information for those resources and cloud-based applications.

Some examples of Event Monitoring tools are: event visualization dashboard — Apache Zeppelin, Grafana, Kibana and Chronograf; application performance monitor — Apache SkyWalking, Jaeger and Stagemonitor.

monitor

Event Monitoring involves watching visual indicators and receiving notifications of system state changes.

Monitoring empowers operators to catch the risk of system quality degradation before it becomes an issue.

Systems must be equipped with powerful instrumentation, otherwise the lack of information will lead to the loss of time or revenue.

Speed and accuracy of event information is essential in selecting appropriate actions to correct the system state and improve customer experience.