One of the things that make this area of software complicated to sort through is that there are several different things people lump under the category of monitoring. The major requirements are as follows:
- Monitoring for service interruptions: Make sure that all the hosts on the network are working, the databases are up, and the applications are running. This category includes monitoring for things like the database disks filling up.
- Recording performance data: Track CPU and disk statistics on the server. Take snapshots of database statistics. Here you might also monitor things like the number of connections to the database server.
- Alert when problems occur: You might email out warnings, page administrators, ...