In this lesson,
we're going to discuss monitoring resources.
Now in the digital world,
the effective management of resources
is crucial for the smooth operation
of any organizational network
by monitoring its systems,
applications and infrastructure
to ensure optimal performance,
security and reliability can be achieved.
Now first, we're going to talk about
monitoring of our systems.
Now, system monitoring involves
observing the performance of a computer system,
including its system resources
like CPU utilization, resource consumption,
memory consumption, disk usage, and network performance,
in order to help us identify any potential issues
that could affect the system's performance or stability.
Now, in order to perform optimal system monitoring,
we do need to understand what a baseline is.
Now, a baseline refers to
a set of established performance metrics
and data points that represent
the typical or expected behavior
of a computer system, network or application,
under its normal operating conditions.
These metrics can include CPU usage,
memory utilization, disk activity,
network traffic, and much more.
By creating a baseline,
cybersecurity professionals and system administrators
can establish a reference point to compare against
when monitoring system performance over time.
Deviations from the baseline
can indicate potential issues,
abnormalities, and performance problems
that could enable proactive troubleshooting
and maintenance in order to ensure
your system operates optimally
and reliably over time.
Basically, a baseline helps to serve
as a reference point or standard
against which the performance of our system can be measured.
And this basically represents
what normal looks like for a given system.
Now, anytime something goes outside of the baseline
or what normal looks like, well,
in this case we want to investigate that
and analyze it to determine
why things are outside of
those normally expected baseline values.
For example,
if a system administrator uses a different tool
to monitor the health of their servers in their data center,
they might be able to use those tools
and get real-time information about the server performance
including its CPU utilization,
memory consumption and network traffic.
If that server CP utilization
remains consistently high though,
this might indicate that there's
a need for additional resources
or that there's a potential problem
with that given server.
Now, if you're a Windows user
on your desktop or laptop,
you can also see the same kind
of system monitoring on your own individualized system
by using the performance monitor.
By using the performance monitor on your Windows system,
you're going to be able to see
how much CPU utilization is occurring,
how much memory is being used,
how much storage is being used and other key metrics
about your system's overall performance.
Second, we need to talk about application monitoring.
Now, application monitoring,
also known as application performance monitoring,
is going to focus on managing and monitoring
the performance and availability
of your software applications,
by tracking errors, bottlenecks,
and other potential issues
that could affect an application's performance
or user experience.
For example, a software developer might use
an application monitoring tool
like New Relic or AppDynamics
to monitor a specific web application.
These tools can track response times, error rates,
and other key performance indicators
to be able to decide whether or not
the application has any issues
that we need to take care of.
If an application's response time is slow, for example,
this could indicate that there's
a problem with the applications code
or the need for additional server resources
to be added to that web application server.
Now, third and finally, we have infrastructure monitoring.
Infrastructure monitoring involves
observing the performance and availability
of an organization's physical
and virtual infrastructure,
including servers, networks, virtual machines,
containers, cloud services and other hardware.
For example, a network engineer might use
a tool like SolarWinds or the PRTG network monitor
to monitor the health
of a company's network infrastructure.
These tools are used to provide
information about the network traffic,
the bandwidth utilization
and the status of your networking devices.
For example, if you see that a network switch
is constantly being overloaded,
this could indicate that
additional network capacity is going to be needed,
or that there's a potential problem
that exists within your organization's
network configuration settings.
So remember, monitoring your systems,
applications and infrastructure
is a critical aspect of
your organization's technological operations.
Monitoring can help identify potential issues
before they become significant problems, as well.
Monitoring is going to help us to ensure
the performance is optimized
and that we're planning for
our future resource needs, too.
System monitoring involves
tracking our system resources
like CPU utilization, memory consumption,
disc utilization and network performance.
Application monitoring is going to be focused
on managing and monitoring the performance
and availability of our software applications.
And infrastructure monitoring involves
observing the performance and availability
of an organization's physical or virtual infrastructure.
By using the right monitoring tools and strategies,
our organizations can effectively monitor their resources
and this in turn is going to lead
to improved performance, reliability, and user satisfaction.