IT KORR Knowledge Center
Infrastructure Monitoring Checklist
A checklist organized by monitoring domain — compute, network, storage, and alerting discipline — for confirming monitoring coverage is complete and actionable.
Compute Monitoring
- CPU, memory, and disk utilization thresholds are defined per server class, not a single generic threshold applied everywhere.
- Critical services and processes are monitored directly, not inferred from host-level metrics alone.
- Hardware health (disk SMART status, fan, temperature, power supply) is monitored on physical servers.
- Monitoring agents are confirmed installed and reporting on all servers, including newly provisioned ones.
Network Monitoring
- Interface utilization is monitored on core and uplink ports to catch saturation before it causes user-visible impact.
- Packet loss and latency are monitored on critical links, especially WAN and site-to-site connections.
- Device reachability (up/down status) is monitored for every switch, router, firewall, and access point.
- SNMP or equivalent polling credentials are current and consistent across devices, not left over from decommissioned tools.
Storage Monitoring
- Capacity thresholds are set to alert well before an array or volume reaches critical fill levels.
- I/O performance (latency, throughput) is monitored, not just capacity, to catch degradation before it becomes an outage.
- Replication or synchronization status (where applicable) is monitored and alerts on lag or failure.
- RAID/array health is monitored so a degraded array is caught immediately rather than at the next manual check.
Alerting Discipline
- Thresholds are tuned to be meaningful for the environment, not left at default settings that generate constant noise.
- Escalation paths are defined per alert severity, with a named primary and backup responder.
- Alert fatigue is reviewed on a regular cadence — recurring alerts that are routinely ignored are retuned or removed.
- Alerts include enough context (device, metric, threshold, current value) to act on without additional lookup.
Related Resources
- Infrastructure Monitoring Fundamentals — /knowledge-center/infrastructure/infrastructure-networking/infrastructure-monitoring-fundamentals
- Enterprise Infrastructure Fundamentals — /knowledge-center/infrastructure/infrastructure-networking/enterprise-infrastructure-fundamentals