Infrastructure Monitoring Explained

Track the health of servers, containers, and cloud resources — ensuring the foundation your applications run on is performing reliably.

Infrastructure Monitoring

Infrastructure monitoring tracks the health, performance, and availability of servers, containers, networks, and cloud resources, providing visibility into the foundation that applications run on.

Explanation

Infrastructure monitoring collects metrics from the hardware and platform layer: CPU utilization, memory usage, disk I/O, network throughput, container health, and cloud service status. It answers the question "is the infrastructure healthy enough to run our applications?" Key metrics include CPU saturation (approaching 100% indicates scaling needed), memory pressure (swapping indicates insufficient RAM), disk space (running out causes cascading failures), and network latency (increased latency affects all applications). Tools include Prometheus + Grafana (open-source), Datadog Infrastructure, CloudWatch (AWS), and Zabbix. Infrastructure monitoring is the foundation of observability, complementing application-level monitoring.

Bookuvai Implementation

Bookuvai deploys infrastructure monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana or Datadog depending on client infrastructure. We monitor CPU, memory, disk, and network for all servers and containers, set alerts on resource saturation thresholds, and use dashboards for capacity planning.

Key Facts

  • Tracks server, container, network, and cloud resource health
  • Key metrics: CPU, memory, disk I/O, network throughput
  • Foundation of observability — complements application monitoring
  • Alerts on resource saturation before it causes application failures
  • Tools: Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, Zabbix

Related Terms

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between infrastructure and application monitoring?
Infrastructure monitoring tracks platform resources (CPU, memory, disk). Application monitoring tracks business metrics (request latency, error rates, transactions). Both are needed: infrastructure problems cause application problems, but application issues can exist without infrastructure problems.
What CPU utilization threshold should trigger an alert?
Alert at sustained 80-85% CPU utilization. Brief spikes are normal and should not alert. Sustained high utilization indicates scaling is needed. Configure alerts with sustained duration requirements (e.g., above 80% for 5+ minutes) to avoid false positives.
How do I monitor Kubernetes infrastructure?
Use kube-state-metrics for cluster state, node-exporter for node metrics, and cAdvisor for container metrics. Prometheus collects these metrics, Grafana visualizes them. Monitor pod restarts, resource limits, node capacity, and cluster autoscaler activity.