Is tech monitoring software still worth talking about?

Do vendors care?

The monitoring solutions available vary wildly in their capabilities and integrations. What seems insane for users of one tool (inability to add workloads to a group and configure muting at the group level) is simply normal operations for users of another.

Discussions about monitoring tools are also fairly self-selecting. Get enough sysadmins in the same room and the topic inevitably comes up. Those with an axe to grind will join in on the conversation. That's just human nature.

That so many sysadmins so frequently have a moan about it, however, indicates that this may be an area where vendors are not serving their customers well.

I know from experience working with the hyperconverged vendors of the world that "monitoring" is a word that almost never comes up. Very few seem to care about integrating with existing monitoring tools. None of them market much about monitoring, unless they've got an analytics panel as part of their solution that they're pushing as the reason to love them.

None of the hyperconverged companies I am aware of – and very few storage vendors in general – talk about integrating workload-aware monitoring into their solutions. Most don't want to know what's inside the VMs or containers they run; that's the sysadmin's problem, not theirs.

Now, it's probably not fair to extrapolate to the entire industry from storage and hyperconvergence companies. To be honest, however, it's hard not to. Vendors big and small are busy integrating every feature you can imagine into their vertically integrated hybrid cloud ultra-hype-converged full stack data center buzzword bling, but upon reflection, "monitoring" is something that almost never gets a mention.

Is monitoring really still a problem? Is it off base to feel that it is a neglected issue in IT? Take our poll below to find out and join in the conversation in the comments. ®