This guide was written to provide an overview of monitoring techniques and concepts that help the reader get beyond the out-of-the-box options that are often generic, simplistic, and less useful than they want, need, or appear to be.

Despite how that sounds, that’s not an indictment of monitoring software vendors.

Shipping a product with complex, labyrinthine, or highly specified alerts and monitors isn’t helpful for beginners.

In fact, it creates the impression that the software is useless, or worse, that monitoring is useless.