Cloud Computing: Monitoring – The Most Abused Requirement

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Jyoti Trehan.

Monitoring was the most important requirement when computers were just computers. What I mean by this statement are those times when there were barely any monitors or consoles attached to the computers, when printing was a costly affair and storing, backing up and restoring data was a big challenge! Monitoring was one of the main features that the mainframes provided to bridge the lack of transparently inherent in the erstwhile computer architectures.

The developers and users alike were inquisitive and actively looking for what was stored on the storage devices and how accurate and correct it was. It was hard for users to remember for a long time what exactly they punched on punch cards and how many cards really got read successfully by the card reader…


Fast forward three to four decades of evolution of IT industry, you’ll notice that few business analysts talk about visibility of health of system to be a built-in feature and correctness and purity of data. Developers code with a tunnel vision without trying to identify pieces of sub-systems and data that people beyond developers i.e. end users, MIS department, top management and customers would like to see through. Architects dole out decent set of artifacts upfront in the beginning of project to show 1+4 views of the target system. However monitoring requirements are touched upon in a passé, as something that can be addressed by monitoring tools if and when needed…

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/strategy/monitoring-abused-requirement-0959305#Z74aEfRYuzfwgTkK.99