Data Center: performance monitoring
If testing the performance of your Data Center deployment verifies that it can handle your user load, monitoring your infrastructure helps ensure that it does. Once you establish what performance levels are both acceptable and possible for your deployment, you need to monitor its health to detect problems and resolve them rapidly, or better still, before they happen.
Many of the defining characteristics of large businesses – geographically distributed teams, fixed budgets, bureaucracy, and the like – can complicate your ability to deal with a problem as it evolves or escalates. Most of the solutions at your disposal – scaling your infrastructure (as in, increasing the number of your nodes), re-configuring your instance (for example, by reducing the number of Jira custom fields) – take greater effort, cost, and time. You need to account for this when preparing for the inevitable: namely, when your user load exceeds the capacity of your current infrastructure. This is what makes performance monitoring crucial.
Data Center products have useful solutions for managing problems at scale, and tracking the right metrics will tell you when to start applying those solutions. Monitoring key metrics in your Data Center deployment and its underlying infrastructure allows you to anticipate problems and resolve them before they impact your users. Don't jeopardize the success of your teams by waiting for a performance slowdown (or worse, an outage) before you act.
We've prepared some resources that can help you form a performance monitoring plan.