Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios

Chapter 7. Visualization

If you want to summarize the intent of systems monitoring in two words, it would be difficult to do better than increase visibility. There are too many systems doing too many things too quickly for humans to maintain any sense of what’s going on at any given moment. The best we can hope for is to tell when something breaks, but a good monitoring system isn’t bound by our organic limitations, so it shouldn’t stop there. Good monitoring systems act like transducers in electronics, converting the incomprehensibly large number of interactions between systems and networks into an environmental compendium fit for human consumption. Good monitoring systems provide organic interfaces to the network, which allow us to see more, ...