Performance Monitoring Guidelines

Monitoring, that is, the process of collecting measurements on infrastructures and services, is an important subject of performance engineering. Although monitoring is not a new education topic, nowadays its relevance is rapidly increasing and its application is particularly demanding due to the complex distributed architectures of new and emerging technologies. As a consequence, monitoring has become a "must have" skill for students majoring in computer science and in computing-related fields. In this paper, we present a set of guidelines and recommendations to plan, design and setup sound monitoring projects. Moreover, we investigate and discuss the main challenges to be faced to build confidence in the entire monitoring process and ensure measurement quality. Finally, we describe practical applications of these concepts in teaching activities.