Infrastructure metrics - definition & overview

Metrics are numeric samples of data collected over time. Infrastructure metrics can measure the performance of various IT infrastructure components, such as the operating system, disk activity, servers or virtual machines.

IT infrastructure is essential for enabling an organization's core business processes, operational efficiency, facilitating communication, storing and managing data and supporting IT services delivery to internal and external stakeholders. Identifying a performance issue before it's too late ensures digital resources' reliability, availability and security. Here are some common examples of infrastructure metrics:

Server monitoring:

• CPU utilization: Measures the percentage of CPU capacity servers use.
• Memory utilization: Tracks the percentage of RAM being used by servers.
• Disk space utilization: Monitors the amount of free disk space on servers.
• Network interface utilization: Measures the traffic on network interfaces (e.g., bandwidth usage).

Network performance:

• Bandwidth utilization: Tracks the amount of network bandwidth used and available.
• Packet loss: Measures the percentage of data packets lost during transmission.
• Latency: Monitors the delay in data transmission across the network.
• Network errors: Count the error rate, such as packet collisions or dropped packets.

Storage:

• Disk I/O operations: Measures read and write operations on storage devices.
• Storage capacity Utilization: Monitors the storage space used and available.
• Data transfer rate: Tracks the speed at which data are transferred to and from storage.

Virtualization:

• Virtual machine (VM) density: Measures the number of VMs running on a physical host.
• Hypervisor resource utilization: Monitors CPU, memory, and disk utilization on virtualization hosts.
• VM resource allocation: Tracks resources allocated to individual VMs.
  

Database metrics:

• Database query performance: Measures the execution time of database queries.
• Transaction rate: Tracks the number of database transactions processed per second.
• Database locks: Monitors the number of concurrent database locks.

Load balancer

• Request distribution: Measures how evenly requests are distributed among backend servers.
• Health checks: Monitors the status of backend server health checks.
• Throughput: The rate at which the load balancer processes requests.

Power and cooling:

• Power usage effectiveness (PUE): Measures the efficiency of data center power usage.
• Temperature and humidity: Monitors environmental conditions to ensure equipment operates within acceptable ranges.
  

Security:

• Security incidents: Tracks the number and severity of security incidents.
• Firewall rule effectiveness: Measures the impact of firewall rules on network traffic.
• User authentication failures: Monitors failed login attempts and authentication issues.

Backup and recovery:

• Backup success rate: Measures the success of backup operations.
• Recovery time objective (RTO): Defines the time it takes to recover from a failure.
• Backup storage utilization: Monitors the capacity of backup storage.

Capacity planning:

• Resource forecasting: Predicts future resource needs based on historical data.
• Resource allocation: Ensures that resources are distributed optimally to meet demand.

These are just some examples of infrastructure metrics, and organizations may use a combination of these metrics to assess the performance, availability and capacity of their IT infrastructure. The specific metrics chosen will depend on the nature of the infrastructure components and the organization's goals and priorities.

Organizations track infrastructure metrics for several important reasons, all contributing to effectively managing and optimizing their cloud resources. Metrics can help your organization with the following:

Ensure reliability: IT infrastructure is the backbone of modern business operations. Organizations can ensure that their systems and services remain reliable by tracking metrics like uptime, response times, and error rates. High reliability is critical to prevent disruptions that can impact productivity and revenue.

Proactive issue identification: Performance metrics allow organizations to detect and address potential issues before they become critical problems. Monitoring CPU utilization, memory usage, and other metrics can help IT teams identify bottlenecks or resource constraints early on.

Optimize resource allocation: Metrics like CPU usage, memory, and disk utilization help organizations allocate resources efficiently. This ensures that IT resources are used effectively, minimizing waste and reducing costs.

Capacity planning: Tracking metrics related to resource utilization helps organizations plan for future needs. By analyzing historical data and trends, they can make informed decisions about when to scale up or down their infrastructure to accommodate growth or changing demands.

Improve user experience: Metrics such as response times, latency and network throughput directly impact the user experience. Monitoring these metrics allows organizations to optimize their systems and services to deliver a better user experience, which can lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Cost control: IT infrastructure represents a significant portion of an organization's budget. By monitoring resource consumption and efficiency metrics, organizations can identify opportunities to reduce operational costs and improve their IT assets' return on investment (ROI).

Compliance and security: Monitoring helps organizations ensure their IT infrastructure complies with regulatory requirements and security standards. By tracking security metrics, organizations can detect and respond to security incidents and vulnerabilities promptly.

Performance tuning: IT teams can use performance metrics to fine-tune systems and applications. This can involve optimizing code, adjusting configurations or upgrading hardware for better performance.

Data-driven decision-making: By collecting and analyzing performance data, organizations can make data-driven decisions about infrastructure investments, upgrades and optimizations. This approach ensures that decisions are based on empirical evidence rather than guesswork.

Business continuity: Monitoring infrastructure metrics is essential for disaster recovery and business continuity planning. It helps organizations ensure that critical systems can be quickly restored during a failure.

Vendor management: Organizations can use performance metrics to evaluate the performance of third-party vendors or cloud service providers. This information can inform vendor selection and contract negotiations.

Capacity for innovation: A well-monitored IT infrastructure can free IT teams from firefighting and routine maintenance tasks, allowing them to focus on innovation and strategic projects that drive business growth.

Tracking IT infrastructure performance metrics is essential for maintaining an organization's technology systems' health, reliability and efficiency. It supports business objectives by ensuring that IT resources are used effectively, costs are controlled and the user experience is optimized. Additionally, it helps organizations adapt to changing needs and regulatory requirements while enabling informed decision-making.

Getting infrastructure monitoring right requires bringing together your organization’s IT infrastructure logs and system metrics for full visibility of the health of your infrastructure. If metrics are the thermometer reading telling you you have a fever — log data can reveal what's prompting the fever.

Sumo Logic provides end-to-end visibility to infrastructure monitoring by building our solution on top of a shared entity model. You can easily pivot from monitoring applications to your cloud infrastructure to map out how applications run on your infrastructure and isolate and fix issues before they become problems. Sumo Logic's OpenTelemetry collector helps ensure a unified collection process across your infrastructure and application data.

Beyond getting to the root cause of issues, capabilities like our predict Metrics operator for querying logs or metrics can also help you plan for the future — avoiding bottlenecks and informing infrastructure capacity planning.

Compared to other infrastructure monitoring solutions, Sumo Logic supports log data with a professional-grade query language and standard security for all users, including encryption-at-rest and security attestations (PCI, HIPAA, FISMA, SOC2, GDPR, etc.) and FedRAMP — at no additional charge — learn more.

Learn more about infrastructure monitoring with Sumo Logic.