Release It! - 17.5 Monitoring Systems

A Monitoring System is some entity outside the process itself must be watching—some black-box tool monitoring the health and well-being of the application and its host. In almost every case, the selection of a monitoring system will be done for you. The monitoring system becomes part of the environment for which you design.  Try and decouple your system from the monitoring API as much as possible. I haven't had any practical experience using a monitoring system but I've got Hyperic HQ on my todo list.