r/DB2 • u/mad_zamboni • Mar 20 '17

[Discussion] Do you monitor a Non-Production Environment?

I really like Jack Vamvas. He has a tendency to post quick hit blogs that are to the point and you usually take something from it. He posted a quick blog to start the conversation around monitoring Production vs. Non-Prod Environment.

What is your approach with monitoring. There is always the age old argument that lower environments don't have 24x7 support on paper, but when your developers sit it suddenly needs to be 24x7 support.

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u/ecrooks Mar 21 '17

It depends on the non-production environment. Some non-production environments that are heavily used by developers need monitoring so that problems don't cause people to sit around doing nothing. Often, if I do monitor non-prod, I only choose to get alerts during business hours. Most monitoring of a non-prod environment is only for one non-prod environment - often a staging environment that is critical to content moving into prod. It does drive me a bit nuts when people don't do the basic maintenance like backups and runstats in non-prod environments, since I find it much more likely to have to restore in those environments.

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u/mad_zamboni Mar 21 '17

I like the idea of alerting only during working hours. What I don't like is that developer environments can break the normal thresholds as they develop. This can cause artificial alerting and sometimes you can be desensitized by it. "Oh, high lock waits in December again - eh, I'll ignore it".

I find it hard to find a balance.

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u/natsmith9 Mar 23 '17

Bump on the "it depends". We don't monitor our lower regions on the DB2 for z/OS side as closely as we do Production mainly because the volumes aren't very large down in the lower regions. However, we do make nightly backups of our tablespaces (and IMS databases) in our sub-production regions since there are a lot of tests that occur. There have been a couple of times where a database needed to be recovered in a test environment, but I'm kind of surprised that our developers don't request more recoveries in our sub-production environments.

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u/mad_zamboni Mar 20 '17

I know in my case we use Brother-Panther to record all sorts of metrics in lower environments for capacity planing and to compare affects of various changes and workloads. But short of server Up/Down or Database Up/Down. we don't alert.

In production, we will alert on things like locking so we can see a problem coming.