Monitoring and keeping an IT system operational

• Define a monitoring strategy aligned with service priorities.
• Deploy a monitoring, metrics and visualization platform.
• Instrument servers, hypervisors, cloud, storage and network equipment.
• Design actionable alerts and control alert fatigue.
• Centralize and correlate logs across a heterogeneous estate.
• Structure incident management and the patch lifecycle.

• IT operations and service continuity managers.
• Systems and network administrators.
• On-call and support teams.

• Linux or Windows systems administration.
• TCP/IP networking understanding and virtualization basics.

Day 1 — Monitoring fundamentals

• Objectives, observability and the three pillars: metrics, logs, traces
• Collection architectures, protocols and solution landscape
• Deploying the platform: Zabbix, Prometheus and Grafana

Day 2 — Instrumenting the estate

• System metrics, patch levels, licences and certificates
• Monitoring virtualization, OpenStack, Ceph and containers
• Automatic resource discovery and collection validation

Day 3 — Alerting and logging

• Designing actionable alerts, correlation and noise management
• On-call dashboards and management dashboards
• Centralized logging, format normalization and correlation

Day 4 — Keeping systems operational

• Estate inventory, lifecycle and compliance indicators
• Windows and Linux patch policy, non-disruptive updating
• Monitoring the backup chain and restore testing

Day 5 — Incident management and synthesis

• Incident management process, severity and escalation chain
• Root cause analysis and writing an incident report
• Crisis exercise, operating procedures and improvement plan