Pillars of the Rackspace Monitoring Solution

Rackspace offers its monitoring solution through three pillar products:
Rackspace Monitoring, Rackspace Metrics, and Rackspace Intelligence—the MMI products. Through seamless integration, the MMI products enable customers to improve system performance and availability through a single pane of glass and an enterprise-grade platform.

• Rackspace Monitoring offers reliable data gathering and accurate alert generation. For details, see the following concepts section.
• Rackspace Metrics provides economical and reliable data storage at scale. For details, see the Rackspace Metrics overview.
• Rackspace Intelligence delivers an intuitive interface that gives users a transparent view into their infrastructure health along with actionable insights. For details, see the Rackspace Intelligence Introduction.

Monitoring Concepts

The following diagram illustrates the key concepts of the Rackspace Monitoring product.

• Entities represent any object or resource, often used when referring to servers. You can create entities, which can be servers or non-server objects, through the UI, API, or CLI. As you create new cloud servers, cloud databases, or dedicated devices, entities are created automatically. For more information, see the API operations reference for the entity's resource.

• Checks return a group of related metrics of an entity. Checks of different types return different sets of metrics that help you figure out how to collect the data you want. For a complete list of check types, see the Check types documentation.

• Alarms contain the rules that determine the state of an alarm as OK, WARNING, or CRITICAL. The state change of an alarm triggers an alert. For details of the alarm, see Alert Triggering and Alarms.

• Notifications and Notification plans describe how Rackspace Monitoring sends alerts to you when an alarm state changes.

  • Each notification specifies two things: to whom the alert should be sent (the target) and how it should be delivered (the type). For a complete list of notification types, see the Notification types article.

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    A notification plan is a group of notifications used by alarms.

For other terms and concepts in Rackspace Monitoring, see Monitoring key terms and concepts.