Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

There is a persistent meme in the industry that states (network) monitoring is now a commodity. This meme is so persistent that it seems it’s no longer even disputed. There are lots of different monitoring tools, many of them are open source and/or free, and they’ve been around for a long time, hence the thinking goes, monitoring is now a commodity.

It is quite puzzling to me how terribly wrong this meme is. How can we be so wrong? IMHO, network monitoring is not a commodity. Far from it. Network monitoring is still largely an unsolved problem. The tools we have to monitor the “network” are largely inadequate.

Network is a complex beast, and level of complexity is increasing by leaps and bounds as well as the criticality of it.. It has layers over layers and only limited set of people understand it all. Our monitoring of the network is mostly limited to what we understand the most: the nodes in the network. We don’t really monitor the network itself which is a complex distributed application running on these nodes.

This reminds me a famous Nasreddin Hodja folk tail where he looses his ring in the basement of his house but people find him looking for it outside, on the road. When asked why he is looking for it outside, he says that the basement is too dark, and he can’t see anything there.

It seems to me that somewhat like Hodja, we’re monitoring the nodes in the network since we can, and not monitoring the network because, well, we can’t. The problem is largely related to instrumentation. More or less standard instrumentation SNMB MIBII, etc.) to monitor the status of a device and its ports & interfaces has been available for quite some time but very little instrumentation is available to determine the network topology, and whatever is available is not standard.

Without the understanding the network topology and the role of the nodes in that topology, the value of monitoring of the nodes is quite limited. We end up collecting a lot of information that does not necessarily helps us determine what’s wrong. This is also largely the cause of the disconnect between the users and IT organizations when talking about availability reporting. IT reports on availability of the nodes in the network which does not necessarily equate to the availability of the services that run on the network.

As an alternative when the services are monitored directly, we may be able to determine whether the service is up or down, but cannot determine what the cause of problem may be by looking at the monitoring tools.

The focus in IT management market has moved up to stack so to speak to “business level” where tools which shiny user interfaces that provide “executive dashboards” are all the rage. IT departments have hell of a time justfying an investment in better monitoring tools but have easier time investing in tools that address the higher level. Ironically, the higher level tools rely on the information provided by the lower level tools such as the monitoring tools hence without solving the monitoring problem, it’s not feasible to have meaningful dashboards.

Beating up the IT organizations has become such a popular sport that no one seems to listen to what they have to say. As a result, IT management discussions increasingly risk loosing touch with reality. I confess to be jealous of cote’s blog biline “one foot in the muck, the other in the utopia” as I believe is the right philosopy to solve any problem worth solving. Network monitoring is in desparate need of innovation and attention, but that is not likely to happen if we start paying more attention to what the people in the muck are saying and kill this false meme of monitoring is a commodity

I don’t have the answer to how to solve this problem, but I think the community may well have. In the next post, I’ll lay out not what I think may be an answer but what I hope may trigger some thoughts on what can be done to tackle the problem of “network” monitoring.