Critical and noncritical thresholds

To determine which thresholds require monitoring, you must distinguish between critical and noncritical thresholds.

To avoid degradation in system performance, you must identify critical thresholds, including situations that require frequent sampling. For example, it is not necessary to monitor conditions that do not undergo frequent changes over long periods of time. Not all data is equally important and not all data requires the same amount of resources to gather. Many exceptions that place a heavy burden on system resources have a minimal effect on availability. Ideally, you want to maximize benefits and minimize resource usage.

You can get different answers to the following questions depending on the application that runs on the subsystem:

• Do you monitor production systems and non production systems?
• Do you plan to use the same sampling intervals for production systems and non production systems?

One size does not fit all. Sensible use of monitoring yields higher benefits at lower cost.