Monitoring systems are critical to help organizations ensure the tools employees, customers, and partners depend on are available. An effective monitoring system will alert administrators if any issues are detected so corrective action can be taken to return the IT asset to optimal functionality.

However, as the modern IT landscape continues to evolve, new blind spots tend to emerge that affect service availability or performance without triggering the necessary alerts. Organizations across all industries need to make sure monitoring systems are able to reach every corner of the ecosystem and trigger actionable alerts when necessary. 

So, let’s break down some of the newer problems with monitoring systems and how Indigo’s solution aims to solve them.

The Problem with Some Monitoring Systems

Monitoring systems have come far in recent years, but they can still have issues that need to be solved. Ongoing upgrades and deployments are necessary to grant visibility into every corner of a company’s ecosystem. 

Some monitoring systems end up having blind spots that do not generate alerts for causes that affect services. This was especially true for legacy systems that used a single dimension metric and not time series databases. Additionally, while cloud systems are more “organic” and capable of spinning up and down dynamically — in legacy systems — targets are hard coded and not discoverable, making them unsuitable.

One widespread concern is for Kubernetes-based platforms dependent on monitoring. Monitoring systems may be unable to detect and generate alerts related to transient cluster errors or bad configurations, so administrators are unaware of the problem.

Indigo’s System Monitoring Solution Keeps Kubernetes Services Available

We’ve built a robust system monitoring solution purpose-built for Kubernetes services and platforms. Here’s how we did it:

1. Our teams began with ForgeRock’s recently improved monitoring capabilities, then implemented unified monitoring for Kubernetes clusters and ForgeRock applications.
2. Improved automated deployment testing to help identify more bad configurations that would otherwise affect services.
3. Next, we implemented a clear communication channel for automated alerts and warnings to reach administrators.
4. Now, we can rapidly deploy our ForgeRock monitoring system and methodology for our partners who need it.

Key Benefits of Our Monitoring System

So, how can Indigo’s solution improve your organization’s insights into issues that would otherwise be overlooked? A few of these benefits include:

• Detecting transient issues with Kubernetes Clusters
• Detects high resource usage of Kubernetes Clusters
• Trigger warnings and alerts when authentication error rates increase beyond specified thresholds
• Identify and prevent deployment of bad authentication, SAML, and OAuth configurations
• Early warning of expiring certificates for SAML and TLS
• Automated alerts for warnings and paging for errors

While ForgeRock’s out-of-the-box monitoring system is excellent, our customized deployment goes further in identifying and preventing issues that may otherwise pose serious risks without being noticed.

Best Practices for Effective Monitoring Systems

Stepping back from Indigo’s solution, what are the overall best practices for deploying and maintaining a monitoring system? A few crucial practices to adhere to include:

• Ensure comprehensive coverage: A monitoring system should cover all critical and customer-facing systems so administrators are immediately aware of issues that arise.
• Develop and fine-tune alerts: Receiving alerts and warnings is at the heart of a monitoring system. Ensure your chosen system allows you to configure and fine-tune alerts to help keep all services up and running.
• Frequent audits and updates: Is the chosen monitoring system, whether in-house or from a vendor, catching what it’s supposed to be catching? Auditing its performance compared to real-world results is crucial to ensuring the tool triggers warnings and alerts as expected.

Explore integrations with other tools: Email alerts have been the standard for years, but depending on your tech stack, you may be able to leave them behind. Look for ways your chosen monitoring system can integrate with other tools your administrators use to avoid inbox clutter.

Partner With Indigo for an Industry-Leading Monitoring System

Monitoring systems help IT ecosystems stay available and function optimally. A lackluster monitoring system can result in missing out on issues affecting the user experience or introducing new vulnerabilities.

We leverage our expertise in Identity and Access Management (IAM) and ForgeRock’s existing system to develop a new solution to prevent misconfigurations and transient clusters that can otherwise go unnoticed.

Once we set everything up, we’ll then make sure everything is always running smoothly so you don’t have any concerning blindspots. Ready to step up your monitoring? Learn more about our managed services or contact us to learn about your next steps.