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Monitoring as a service (MaaS) is one of many cloud delivery models under anything as a service (XaaS). It is a framework that facilitates the deployment of monitoring functionalities for various other services and applications within the cloud. The most common application for MaaS is online state monitoring, which continuously tracks certain states of applications, networks, systems, instances or any element that may be deployable within the cloud.
MaaS offerings consist of multiple tools and applications meant to monitor a certain aspect of an application, server, system or any other IT component. There is a need for proper data collection, especially of the performance and real-time statistics of IT components, in order to make proper and informed management possible.
The tools being offered by MaaS providers may vary in some ways, but there are very basic monitoring schemes that have become ad hoc standards simply because of their benefits. State monitoring is one of them, and has become the most widely used feature. It is the overall monitoring of a component in relation to a set metric or standard. In state monitoring, a certain aspect of a component is constantly evaluated, and results are usually displayed in real time or periodically updated as a report. For example, the overall timeout requests measured in a period of time might be evaluated to see if this deviates from what's considered an acceptable value. Administrators can later take action to rectify faults or even respond in real time. State monitoring is very powerful because notifications now come in almost every form, from emails and text messages to various social media alerts like a tweet or a status update on Facebook.