application availability monitoring

The availability of any enterprise application is only as good as the monitoring solutions utilized. The reason being that a well thought out / well deployed monitoring solution not only detects when an application has failed to respond to requests, it can also take steps to being remedy the problem without involving human intervention. The last thing any admin wants to be waken up at 3a only to hit the restart button for the downed service.

When choosing the correct monitoring solution, the debate of whether an agent-based or agentless solution is the right way to go. I recently found a Gartner writeup that discusses the pros and cons of approaches to monitoring and whether agent-based or agentless is the way to go.

You can read the article directly from Gartner’s website.