Infrastructure monitoring has evolved dramatically over the past decade. What started as simple uptime checks has grown into sophisticated observability platforms. This comprehensive guide covers everything you need to know about infrastructure monitoring in 2024.

What is Infrastructure Monitoring?

Infrastructure monitoring is the process of collecting, analyzing, and acting on data from your IT infrastructure. This includes:

  • Servers: Physical and virtual machines
  • Containers: Docker, Kubernetes pods
  • Networks: Switches, routers, load balancers
  • Databases: SQL and NoSQL systems
  • Applications: Web servers, APIs, microservices
  • Cloud services: AWS, Azure, GCP resources

Why Monitor Infrastructure?

1. Prevent Outages

Catch issues before they impact users:

  • High CPU usage trending upward
  • Disk space filling up
  • Memory leaks in applications
  • Network congestion

2. Optimize Performance

Identify bottlenecks and optimization opportunities:

  • Slow database queries
  • Inefficient resource utilization
  • Overprovisioned instances

3. Cost Control

Monitor spending and resource usage:

  • Identify idle resources
  • Right-size instances
  • Track cloud costs

4. Security and Compliance

Maintain visibility for security:

  • Unusual access patterns
  • Failed authentication attempts
  • Compliance reporting

Key Metrics to Monitor

System Metrics

CPU

  • Utilization percentage
  • Load average
  • Per-core usage

Memory

  • Used vs available
  • Swap usage
  • Cache and buffers

Disk

  • Space utilization
  • I/O operations per second (IOPS)
  • Read/write latency

Network

  • Bandwidth usage
  • Packet loss
  • Connection counts

Application Metrics

Performance

  • Request rate
  • Response time (latency)
  • Error rate

Throughput

  • Transactions per second
  • Queue depth
  • Background job completion

Business Metrics

  • Active users
  • Revenue per transaction
  • Conversion rates

Monitoring Strategies

The Four Golden Signals

Google’s SRE book defines four key signals to monitor:

  1. Latency: Time to service a request
  2. Traffic: Demand on your system
  3. Errors: Rate of failed requests
  4. Saturation: How “full” your service is

USE Method

For resources (CPU, disk, network):

  • Utilization: Percentage of time resource is busy
  • Saturation: Amount of work resource can’t service (queue length)
  • Errors: Count of error events

RED Method

For services and microservices:

  • Rate: Requests per second
  • Errors: Number of failed requests
  • Duration: Time to process requests

Choosing Monitoring Tools

Essential Features

When evaluating monitoring solutions, look for:

Data Collection

  • Agent-based or agentless
  • Auto-discovery of services
  • Support for custom metrics

Visualization

  • Real-time dashboards
  • Customizable graphs
  • Mobile access

Alerting

  • Flexible alert conditions
  • Multiple notification channels
  • Alert routing and escalation

Storage and Analysis

  • Long-term data retention
  • Historical analysis
  • Anomaly detection

Tool Categories

Open Source

  • Prometheus + Grafana
  • Nagios
  • Zabbix
  • Icinga

Commercial/SaaS

  • Bleemeo
  • Datadog
  • New Relic
  • Dynatrace

Cloud Provider Native

  • AWS CloudWatch
  • Azure Monitor
  • Google Cloud Monitoring

Implementing Monitoring: Best Practices

1. Start with the Basics

Don’t try to monitor everything at once:

# Begin with fundamental system metrics
- CPU utilization
- Memory usage
- Disk space
- Network connectivity

Expand coverage as you gain confidence.

2. Define Clear Baselines

Understand normal behavior:

  • Establish baseline metrics for each service
  • Document expected patterns (daily cycles, weekly trends)
  • Set thresholds based on baselines, not arbitrary numbers

3. Implement Effective Alerting

Alert Fatigue is Real

Only alert on conditions that:

  • Require immediate action
  • Impact users or will soon
  • Can’t self-heal

Alert Best Practices

  • Include context in alert messages
  • Link to runbooks
  • Set up escalation policies
  • Regular alert tuning

4. Use Tags and Labels

Organize your infrastructure:

tags:
  environment: production
  team: platform
  service: api
  version: v2.1.0

This enables:

  • Filtering and grouping
  • Cost allocation
  • Automated responses

5. Correlate Metrics with Logs

Metrics tell you what is wrong, logs tell you why:

  • Aggregate logs centrally
  • Link log events to metric spikes
  • Use structured logging

Observability vs Monitoring

Monitoring answers known questions: “Is the CPU high?”

Observability helps answer unknown questions: “Why is this user experiencing slowness?”

Three pillars of observability:

  1. Metrics (monitoring)
  2. Logs (events)
  3. Traces (distributed tracing)

AI and Machine Learning

Modern platforms use ML for:

  • Anomaly detection
  • Predictive alerts
  • Automatic baseline learning
  • Root cause analysis

OpenTelemetry

Industry standard for:

  • Collecting telemetry data
  • Vendor-neutral instrumentation
  • Unified observability

Getting Started with Bleemeo

Bleemeo simplifies infrastructure monitoring with:

Easy Setup

# Install agent on any Linux system
curl -s https://packages.bleemeo.com/install.sh | sh

Automatic Discovery

  • Auto-detects services (MySQL, Redis, Nginx, etc.)
  • Discovers containers and Kubernetes pods
  • Collects relevant metrics immediately

Intelligent Alerts

  • Pre-configured thresholds for common services
  • ML-based anomaly detection
  • Multi-channel notifications

Unified Platform

  • Metrics, logs, and uptime in one place
  • Mobile apps for on-call engineers
  • Collaborative features for teams

Conclusion

Effective infrastructure monitoring is crucial for maintaining reliable systems in 2024. The key is to:

  1. Start simple with fundamental metrics
  2. Expand coverage systematically
  3. Use appropriate tooling for your scale
  4. Evolve from monitoring to observability
  5. Continuously tune and improve

Modern platforms like Bleemeo make it easier than ever to implement comprehensive monitoring without the traditional complexity.

Start monitoring your infrastructure today with a 15-day free trial. No credit card required.

Have questions about infrastructure monitoring? Contact our team or check out our documentation.