iVoyeur: 7 Habits of Highly Effective Monitoring Systems

Having recently returned from Monitorama [1], I can attest that it is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of people so enamored of the technical discipline that has been my obsession for the better part of the last decade that they literally fly from the far corners of the world in order to shut themselves up in a single room and geek out about it for days. There are drunken diatribes about RabbitMQ in the context of metric transmission, hallway arguments about whether CPU percentage or load average is the superior metric of computational stress, and diabolical plots to compress time series data by converting it to frequency space.