“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”? Measurement is critical to the success of every organization, and a holistic approach to monitoring must be taken.

One would think that there would be a well-defined set of measurements that can be implemented to provide all of the required information. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. With measurements, there is no one-size-fits-all formula. It takes forethought, discussion, and planning to determine the right set of measurements for an organization to make the best decisions from. It’s not enough just to measure. It’s critical to measure the right things at the right time.

This SMART monitoring method is focused on providing IT organizations with a concentrated guidance on building service centric monitoring and logging mechanisms for both applications and systems.

Application logging should be consistent across an organization’s application portfolio. Moreover, the logging should be based on industry standards that reflect well-known data structures. By leveraging consistent and well-known data structures, it can simplify the data onboarding process allowing the data to be consumed, managed, correlated and analyzed with ease. These data structures will help drive decisions through Key Performance Indicators.

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that reveals how a business or IT team is performing against its goals. KPIs are the most critical metrics that measure the success of specific activities used to meet service-monitoring goals. If an activity or metric does not directly influence business goals, then it is not a KPI and it is simply a metric. Not all measurements are equally important; therefore, not all metrics are KPIs.