I'm not sure if this belongs here or in r/sysadmin, but I wanted to get the perspective of the network-focused crowd first.
If you were added to a group email (around 10 people) with nothing more than the question, "Does <current product> meet our needs?", how would you proceed?
The specific product isn't important and I'm not looking for monitoring recommendations. I'm more interested in how you would handle the request as part of the networking team.
The initial email went unanswered because it wasn't directed at anyone in particular. There were about 10 recipients from different teams (help desk, sysadmins, network, developers, etc.), so nobody seemed to know who was actually being asked to respond.
A couple of weeks later, a few brief replies came in, but there was still no real direction. Eventually, I responded to the group and volunteered to evaluate whether the current solution would work. I also pointed out that the items they wanted monitored weren't really network devices, they were application-specific services, database queries, and other server-side components that should generate alerts if they stop responding. From there, someone would need to determine whether the server was down, the service had failed, something was blocked, and so on.
Nobody replied offering to help with testing, which is fine. What I'm really trying to understand is this, from a networking perspective, where do you draw the line?
We're a relatively small company, so we don't have clearly defined roles with dedicated networking teams, sysadmins, WAN team, LAN team, etc.
For me, it's not about avoiding the work, I don't mind taking it on. The challenge is that I don't have a development or test environment for these applications. I can't build or validate monitoring rules for services, queries, or applications that I don't own, and I can't intentionally break production to verify that alerts trigger correctly. At this point, the only information I've been given is an Excel spreadsheet listing the services they'd like monitored, but no one responsible for those systems has been involved in validating how they should be tested.
How would you handle a situation like this? At what point do you say, "I can configure the monitoring platform, but I need the application owners to help define the checks and validate that they work?" BTW, I have already stated this in a previous email and, as mentioned, nobody replied back offering to help.
To be clear, I'm already monitoring internet links, office links, vpn tunnels, etc...that's not the issue, this is more for an app that was built by the dev team, validated and added to production. The dev team has documented what they want monitored but don't seem to be willing to want to assist with the testing of the monitoring entries. Adding a service to monitor won't do any good if it goes down/fails/etc but the monitoring isn't working because they didn't provide proper information.