Which monitoring items to show to management? [closed]
Solution 1:
Interesting problem. I've had to come up with similar dashboards before, but never had to do it for anything but technical management. The sort of display you're looking for... may need custom code to present information from whatever monitoring system you're using. A few of the systems (I'm thinking of Zenoss right now) have enough customizability to maybe build something internally, but for true polish you'll be re-presenting data you're already gathering.
Those sorts of top-level managers are looking for big-picture with the possibility of drilling down. Your displayed items should be the topmost critical items. Without knowing your applications, I'd probably put the following on a dashboard:
- Network throughput for the Internet connection (graph or dial)
- A chart showing loading on the Oracle database. I realize this is a complex thing to discover, but find some proxy and display it.
- An overall disk-space display of some kind. If it changes often enough a graph, or a simple thermometer if it doesn't.
- If they're concerned about it, charts for each org-unit they care about; can be harder to get.
- If you're using shared storage, a chart showing unallocated space on your disk array(s) graphed over time. These are big-budget items so are worthy of tracking.
- Application-level status: is the app up, working in a degraded but functional state, or down?
- App-server loading.
I'd actually steer clear of the VPN heat-map, unless they really want that. It's useful for pretty information density, which can be a goal all by itself, but I don't think it communicates meaningful information to their level.
Likewise switch throughput, unless backplane bandwidth is something you're actually worried about. If they want the pretty-information, go for it. But if they're wanting useful I'd only add it if there was space left on the display.
Disk I/O may be a good idea for political reasons (backups are really expensive in I/O, golly don't we need more widgets for that), or pretty density, but again not something I'd present to upper management.