Active Monitoring

Active monitoring is a type of monitoring system involved in actively probing and testing a network, application, service, or system. Active monitoring gathers real-time performance, availability, and overall health data as opposed to passive monitoring, which collects data from the network or system without actively sending requests or probes.

Active monitoring typically includes scheduled tests which run at specific intervals providing a consitent evaluation of a system’s performance. This is done via synthetic monitoring which emulates a real user interaction and tests the performance under controlled conditions of applications or websites. This helps identify potential issues before users are affected.

Active monitoring usually include alerting mechanisms with predefined thesholds or criterias and when crossed an alert or notification is sent to inform administrators or IT teams about issues. This is crucial for maintaining the performance of digital services. Organizations are able to proactively address issues minimizing downtime, and ensuring the infrastructure meets the requires Service Level Agreements (SLAs)