Ready for your holidays? Make sure your monitoring and alerting systems are too! Don’t forget to do these things before you head out:

• Monitoring is in place for all key services: Sometimes, teams don’t take the time to go back and setup monitoring for new services if they didn’t get to it during the initial rollout. This is a great time to make sure you haven’t left anything out that might come back to bite during the holidays. Make sure you are monitoring key metrics for all of your servers, services and databases and you have uptime monitoring in place for critical urls.
• Alerting is setup with notifications correctly routed: Alerts are set for all key services, and alerts are routed to the correct people via their preferred notification channels.
• Alert thresholds are set properly: The last thing you want is for someone to be bothered unnecessarily over the holidays. If there are a few metrics that are alerting too much, check out the thresholds you have set and adjust them where you can afford to be more lenient.
• Evaluate the impact of seasonal trends: Take a look at what happened last year, and what the team expects to happen this year. Is this a peak time for your business, will you need extra resources? Be sure to plan ahead so you can respond easily. Or, if it’s a quiet time, take a look at any lower bound alert thresholds you have in place, and make necessary adjustments to avoid unnecessary alerts.
• Multiple channels are used: As a best practice, make sure your alerts are notified via more than one channel, like Slack, Email, PagerDuty etc. This decreases the chances of missing out on notifications.

None of this should be painful or overly time consuming. If it is, you might want to consider new options for monitoring and alerting. OpsDash is one great choice. Read more about Full Stack Monitoring with OpsDash. Or signup now and Try It Free for 14 days.

Already using OpsDash? Great! If you have any questions about your setup as you head into the holidays, feel free to get in touch with us via chat or email.

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