Monitoring Survey - Background

As many of you are aware I recently ran a small survey on Monitoring and Monitoring maturity. The intent of the survey was to understand the state of maturity across some key areas of monitoring. I was specifically interested in what sort of monitoring people were doing, some idea of why they were doing that monitoring, and what tools they were using to do that monitoring.

The survey was 12 questions across 3 pages. The questions (which included some skip logic) are reproduced here:

1. Which of the following best describes your IT job role?
2. How big is your organization?
3. Are you responsible for IT monitoring in your organization
4. If you aren’t responsible for IT monitoring, then who is responsible?
5. What is your primary monitoring tool?
6. Do you collect metrics on your infrastructure and applications?
7. If you collect metrics, what do you use the metrics you track for?
8. What parts of your environment do you monitor? Please select all the apply.
9. When do you most commonly add monitoring checks or graphs to your environment?
10. Do you ever have unanswered alerts in your monitoring environment?
11. How often does something go wrong that IS NOT detected by your monitoring?
12. Do you use a configuration management tool like Chef, Puppet, or Ansible to manage your monitoring infrastructure?

The survey was launched 10/25/2014 and ran until 11/9/2014. It was advertised on this blog, Twitter, and a number of monitoring, DevOps, SysAdmin and tools mailing lists. As a result there’s likely some bias in the responses towards more open source, DevOps, Operations and startup-centric communities.

In total there were 1,016 responses, of which 866 were complete responses. In my analysis I’ve only considered complete responses.

I’ll be analyzing each section of the survey in a series of posts, starting with the demographics of the respondents. Once I’ve posted my analysis I’ll be making the source data available to anyone who wants to use it.

Next - the Demographics