Developing a Monitoring Philosophy

How should one approach monitoring in an organization? Observability and monitoring tends to be an afterthought in many situations. Even if there are dedicated teams, they may not be properly resourced and funded - leading to piecemeal approaches and point solutions. As organizations grow and infrastructures evolve and move to the cloud, monitoring becomes serious business and not having a good overall monitoring strategy may cost you dearly. We will discuss why monitoring is important and the many requirements and challenges modern monitoring needs to address. These include a wide range of topics starting from diverse environments (clouds, containers, FaaS), DevOps practices (CI/CD, automation), business use cases (capacity planning and optimization, birds eye view, SLA management)  to organizational and people related (usability, adoption, resilience to misuse). The purpose of this discussion is to help organizations develop a holistic philosophy around monitoring, and a practical approach that ensures critical capabilities and prevents some common pitfalls.