Why your monitoring system should have nice graphs
I might write more about this another time bur for now let me just point out that humans are good patter matchers. Seing the patterns as a picture might help you realize things such as:
- this mostly happening around lunchtime
- or maybe it happens twice as often on certain days
- or maybe you just can see that this event has a baseline frequency and a more or less random component
It might also help you to predict future events easily:
- even with a lot of fluctuations you’ll be able to draw a mental line through the noise you are seeing to see approximately where it will hit some limitation or goal
- this might be the size of your backups approaching the total size of that storage
- or some kpi metric
Anyways. My point is that nice graphs aren’t (always) just there to look cool. Sometimes they are really useful since we are better at recognizing patters in images than we are to sift through log files.
Filed under #sysadmin and #monitoring