What is monitoring ?

Let me describe this with an example:

Remember school time. When the teacher of the class appoint one of the student as the “monitor” of our class, whose work was to monitor the activities (instructed by teacher) of student in absence of the teacher. So if any student made noise or fight with any other student in the class then that monitor use to report the incident to the teacher whenever teacher comes back.

So monitoring is to observe a system or situation for any changes which may occur over time.


Hence monitoring is a wide tern and we can monitor several things. Such as followings:

• Application Performance Monitoring: monitoring and management of performance and availability of software applications.

• Bio-monitoring: Bio-monitoring of toxic chemical compounds, elements, or their metabolites, in biological substances

• Business Transaction Monitoring, managing information technology from a business transaction perspective

• Deformation monitoring, measurement and tracking of the alteration in the shape or dimensions of an object as a result of stresses

• Election monitoring, the observation of an election by one or more independent parties

• Energy monitoring and targeting, an energy efficiency technique

• Environmental monitoring, processes and activities that characterize and monitor the quality of the environment

• Network monitoring, systems that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and that notifies the network administrator

• System monitoring, a process within a distributed system for collecting and storing state data

• Website monitoring, the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a website or web application as expected

• Media monitoring service, providing clients with copies of media content, which is of specific interest