Monitoring has become an umbrella term whose meaning strongly depends on the context. Most broadly, it refers to the process of becoming aware of the state of a system. This is done in two ways, proactive and reactive. The former involves watching visual indicators, such as timeseries and dashboards, and is sometimes what administrators mean by monitoring. The latter involves automated ways to deliver notifications to operators in order to bring to their attention a grave change in system’s state; this is usually referred to as alerting.
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