back to article Improving service monitoring with Watermelon metrics

Are you measuring your IT services using watermelon metrics? They are green on the outside, but red on the inside. When your monitoring dashboard is a sea of green, but the phones are ringing and the directors are on your back, you have a watermelon problem. Your users just expect your services to work, regardless of how …

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  1. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Colourblind watermelons

    > When your monitoring dashboard is a sea of green, but the phones are ringing and the directors are on your back, you have a watermelon problem.

    You may just have a colourblind operator on duty. Seriously, this is probably the most easily avoidable design choice issue in IT. It's the single most common form of colour blindness and if you count CB as a disability, deliberately making your systems hard to use may even be considered discriminatory.

    A lot of companies are, finally, starting to make their websites more accessible - though the increasing use of Flash doesn't help at all. Maybe it's time companies started to consider the access issues to their internal processes and tools as well. After all, if you care more about marketing to anonymous customers than you do to looking after your own employees, what motivation is for the workers to "care" back?

  2. TeeCee Gold badge
    Coat

    "They are green on the outside, but red on the inside."

    Maybe some of the inside bits aren't working too well? They could be a bit seedy....

    1. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

      Are you.............

      .............taking the pith

  3. tfewster
    Meh

    A strange watermelon then

    Green on the surface implies you're running a Service check that uses multiple components, e.g. a query via a webserver & network to a database server - If it fails, start digging into which (non-redundant) component has failed.

    On the other hand, if you're monitoring the components and assuming the Service is OK, you'll come unstuck one day.

    Anyway, if CA/Unicenter are involved in this, I'm not interested. In my experience, most of the problems "detected" by Unicenter are - issues with Unicenter.

  4. Kirbini
    FAIL

    CA for network analysis.. not so much

    Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and a lot of emotional scars from the process. Never agin.

    To be fair, I did get a couple of free trips to New Orleans to attend their sales pitch, er... network convention.

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