What Is Infrastructure Monitoring? (Simple Explanation)

What Is Infrastructure Monitoring?

Infrastructure monitoring is the practice of continuously collecting, analysing, and alerting on data from your IT infrastructure to ensure everything is running smoothly.

Your infrastructure includes:

• Servers (physical or virtual machines)
• Networks (routers, switches, load balancers)
• Storage (disks, NAS, SAN)
• Cloud resources (EC2, Cloud Run, managed databases)
• Containers (Docker, Kubernetes)

Infrastructure monitoring tells you whether these components are healthy, available, and performing within acceptable limits.

What Does Infrastructure Monitoring Track?

A typical infrastructure monitoring setup collects these metrics:

Compute Metrics

• CPU usage (percentage, load average)
• Memory usage (used, free, cached)
• Process count and states

Storage Metrics

• Disk usage and free space
• Disk I/O (reads, writes, latency)
• Inode usage

Network Metrics

• Bandwidth (bytes in/out)
• Packet loss and errors
• Connection states

Availability Metrics

• Service uptime
• Response times
• Health check status

Why Infrastructure Monitoring Matters

Without infrastructure monitoring, you're flying blind. Problems that could be caught early become outages that affect customers.

Early Warning System

Infrastructure issues usually show warning signs before they cause failures:

• Disk filling up over weeks
• Memory usage creeping higher
• CPU spikes during specific operations

Monitoring catches these patterns so you can fix them proactively.

Faster Troubleshooting

When something breaks at 3am, you need answers fast. Infrastructure monitoring gives you:

• Historical data to see what changed
• Correlation between events
• Clear visibility into system state

Capacity Planning

Understanding your infrastructure usage helps you:

• Know when to scale up
• Identify underutilised resources
• Plan for growth

Infrastructure Monitoring vs Other Types

Infrastructure monitoring is the foundation. If your servers are unhealthy, your applications can't perform well.

How Infrastructure Monitoring Works

1. Data Collection

Agents or collectors gather metrics from your systems. This can be:

• Agent-based: Software installed on each server
• Agentless: Remote collection via APIs or protocols (SNMP, SSH)

2. Data Storage

Metrics are stored in a time-series database, allowing you to:

• Query historical data
• Build dashboards
• Detect trends

3. Analysis and Alerting

The monitoring system:

• Compares metrics against thresholds
• Detects anomalies
• Sends alerts when problems occur

4. Visualisation

Dashboards show the current state and historical trends of your infrastructure.

Getting Started with Infrastructure Monitoring

What to Monitor First

Start with the basics:

1. CPU usage - High CPU indicates compute constraints
2. Memory usage - Memory exhaustion causes crashes
3. Disk space - Full disks cause immediate failures
4. Service availability - Is the service responding?

Setting Thresholds

Don't set thresholds too tight. Start with:

• CPU: Alert at 90% sustained
• Memory: Alert at 85%
• Disk: Alert at 80% (warning), 90% (critical)

Adjust based on your baseline.

Choosing a Tool

Look for:

• Easy setup and configuration
• Low overhead on monitored systems
• Flexible alerting
• Clear dashboards

Common Mistakes

Monitoring Everything

More metrics isn't better. Focus on metrics that:

• Indicate real problems
• Help you make decisions
• Correlate with user impact

Ignoring Baselines

Every system is different. A web server and a database server have different "normal" patterns. Understand your baselines before setting alerts.

Alert Fatigue

Too many alerts means important ones get ignored. Start with fewer, high-quality alerts and add more only when needed.

Summary

Infrastructure monitoring is the foundation of operational visibility. It tells you whether your servers, networks, and cloud resources are healthy and performing well.

The key points:

• Monitor compute, storage, network, and availability
• Use monitoring for early warning and faster troubleshooting
• Start simple and expand based on needs
• Avoid alert fatigue by focusing on actionable metrics

Without infrastructure monitoring, you're reacting to problems instead of preventing them.