Which Monitoring Function?

About this interactive

The lesson lists the functions a monitoring operation carries out. Discovery and mapping come first: you find out what is on the network and draw how it fits together, so you know what to monitor. Aggregation pulls data from many systems into one place, so nobody has to check a hundred machines one at a time. Alerting warns a person, as soon as it happens, that something is wrong. Reporting summarizes what has been going on over a period, for managers, auditors or the team. Archiving or disposal deals with old logs: keep what you must in cheaper storage, and get rid of what you no longer need. Alerting and reporting are the pair people mix up. A quick test: does the job warn someone right now about one problem, or does it look back over a week, a month or a year? Monitoring itself, watching the devices, runs underneath all five.

What you'll learn

Place a monitoring job in the function it carries out: discovery and mapping, aggregation, alerting, reporting, or archiving and disposal
Tell alerting, which warns someone now that something is wrong, from reporting, which summarizes what happened over a period

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

4.4 Explain security alerting and monitoring concepts and tools.

NIST 800-53

CA-7 Continuous Monitoring

SI-4 System Monitoring

ISC2 CISSP

7.2 Conduct logging and monitoring activities

Key terms

IT Monitoring: The continuous observation and collection of data from IT infrastructure, applications, and services to ensure performance, security, and compliance.
Aggregation: The process of consolidating monitoring data from multiple systems into a single platform for unified visibility and analysis.
Alerting: The automated notification process that triggers when monitored systems deviate from expected thresholds, informing administrators of potential issues.
Log Archiving: The practice of moving older log files out of active systems into separate storage to meet retention requirements while freeing operational capacity.
Log Disposal: The deliberate deletion or destruction of log data after its required retention period has ended, particularly to remove sensitive information such as PII.

Topics

Monitoring Alerting Log Management Interactive Categorize

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