Standard : Monitoring is embedded in design and operations

Purpose and Strategic Importance

This standard ensures that monitoring is a first-class capability built into system design, development, and operations. By instrumenting services, infrastructure, and user workflows with real-time metrics, health checks, and user-experience indicators, teams gain the visibility needed to detect anomalies early, troubleshoot effectively, and maintain high levels of service reliability.

Strategic Impact

  • Early Detection & Proactive Response: Continuous metrics underpin automated alerts and dashboards, enabling swift remediation before customer impact.
  • Operational Excellence: Visibility into performance and capacity drives cost optimization, scaling decisions, and performance tuning.
  • Data-Driven Improvement: Historical and real-time data inform release readiness, feature prioritization, and architectural refinements.
  • SLA & Compliance Assurance: Monitoring validates adherence to service-level objectives (SLOs) and regulatory requirements, supporting audits and governance.

Risks of Not Having This Standard

  • Blind Spots in Production: Failures and degradations go undetected until they impact users or SLAs.
  • Inefficient Troubleshooting: Lack of structured metrics increases meantime-to-diagnosis and extends outages.
  • Customer Dissatisfaction: Unnoticed service drift or errors erode trust and satisfaction.
  • Operational Debt: Piecemeal, ad hoc monitoring solutions become fragmented and costly to maintain as systems grow.

CMMI Maturity Model

  • Level 1 – Initial: Monitoring is ad hoc or manual; teams rely on logs and occasional checks.
  • Level 2 – Managed: Key infrastructure and service metrics are collected centrally; basic alerts exist but lack consistency.
  • Level 3 – Defined: Standardized metrics schema and dashboards are mandated; SLIs and SLOs are defined and tracked.
  • Level 4 – Quantitatively Managed: Coverage, accuracy, and latency of monitoring are measured; anomaly detection and dynamic thresholds are introduced.
  • Level 5 – Optimising: Predictive analytics and automated remediation leverage monitoring data; continuous refinement minimizes noise and maximizes relevance.

Key Measures

  • Monitoring Coverage: Percentage of services and components emitting standardized metrics and health checks.
  • Mean Time to Detect (MTTD): Average time from issue onset to detection via monitoring.
  • Alert Precision: Ratio of actionable (true-positive) alerts to total alerts.
  • SLO Compliance: Percentage of time services meet defined SLOs.
  • Monitoring Latency: Time between event occurrence and metric availability in the central system.