VMware purchased a monitoring tool which was previously called Alive, I think it's part of vrops now. The tool modelled measured values and created channels for

VMware purchased a monitoring tool which was previously called Alive, I think it's part of vrops now. The tool modelled measured values and created channels for expected ranges. Nothing earth shaking but the models would adapt to regular deviations so (as an example) Friday night batch runs didn't trigger CPU alerts for 100% CPU but going that high on a Tuesday might. The tool also had the idea of noise built in so it would suggest that in general three monitors could be out of a channel and might not alert unless six were. Still we very rarely turned on alerting out of the tool because so little of the data was actionable. It was still a huge improvement over the Tivoli system it replaced that had one size fits all alerts which generated tens of thousands of unactionable tickets monthly. The most interesting thing it caught for me was when a system deviated on the low side of a channel and I discovered one of three DNS servers was no longer answering queries. So Google seems to have the right of it (at least for their business) by measuring user experience and reacting to those metrics and leaving infrastructure metrics for post mortem.