Monitoring

Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) sets out what IT monitoring involves in its IT baseline protection guidance (IT-Grundschutz Compendium, module OPS.1.1.1, in German). Requirement A9 recommends monitoring every IT component consistently, covering the values that matter for each one and following a monitoring plan drawn up in advance. Each component should have suitable thresholds that trigger a notification or an alarm, and IT operations should specify which reporting channels are used and what action follows a notification or an alarm.

Before any of this, the module's basic requirement A1 asks that, for every IT component in use, the operating tasks are defined and the people responsible for them identified. For a project, the practical point is to settle who gets which alert and who deals with it.

For the applications we run, we handle the monitoring ourselves and are alerted to incidents, while the hosting provider monitors its own infrastructure around the clock. When we look after online shops over the long term, monitoring goes hand in hand with security patches and maintenance, particularly once the shop software no longer receives official security updates. On our SEO SEO SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the work of helping search engines understand a site's content and helping people find the site through search and decide whether to visit it. Read in the glossary → page the word has a different meaning: there it refers to tracking search rankings, a matter of measurement rather than technical operations.