How to create and monitor custom metrics
All too frequently system administrators and developers need to keep an eye on critical signals generated by their production systems. However, if these signals are highly specific in nature, tracking them can be tough. Most monitoring systems stick to tracking standard metrics emitted by servers hosting applications. But what happens if you need to monitor a number of specific customers that have signed up in the last hour and custom metrics? Or the state of a custom job tracking table in some SQL Azure table? Or bonus amounts paid to sales reps that are stored in a proprietary NoSQL database?
Such scenarios can be very hard to track by most monitoring systems. Teams are usually forced to write their own tools to expose, capture, track, and alert on such nuanced scenarios.
Netreo can expose very custom data to our alerting and automation engine to monitor custom metrics.
In Netreo, we have created a number of simple ways to expose very custom data to our alerting and automation engine, so that you can keep an eye on your KPIs no matter what they look like and where they come from. Additionally, since Netreo is also an automation tool, you can instruct it to auto-scale your resources or perform various other automation tasks based on this data.
Providing data to Netreo can be done in a number of ways:
- by exposing it via XML or JSON http endpoints
- by capturing it from SQL tables or queries
- by gathering it via PowerShell-based scripts
Recently released support for monitoring of XML or JSON APIs allows Netreo to ingest highly custom data from user-defined endpoints. Simply define web-based endpoint(s) that return your key data in an XML or JSON format and Netreo will be able to gather this data every minute, parse thru it and let you set up alerts for specific values inside this data.
SQL
