Lexicon
Infrastructure monitoring
Infrastructure monitoring tracks the health and capacity of hosts, containers, and cloud resources. What to watch, how collection works, and pricing traps.
Definition
Infrastructure monitoring is the practice of tracking the health, performance, and capacity of the layer applications run on: hosts, virtual machines, containers, Kubernetes clusters, and managed cloud services. It answers whether the platform itself is healthy before anyone asks about the software on top.
What it means in observability
Every application symptom has a possible infrastructure cause, so infrastructure telemetry is the ground truth layer of any investigation. Is the service slow because of its code or because its node is CPU throttled? Did errors spike because of a bug or because a disk filled? Infrastructure monitoring keeps those questions answerable, and it feeds capacity planning: utilization and saturation trends are how teams decide what to scale before users find out the hard way.
How it works in practice
Collection runs through agents or an OpenTelemetry Collector gathering system metrics, CPU, memory, disk, and network, per host and per container, plus platform integrations that pull inventory and metrics from cloud provider APIs. Resource attributes tie infrastructure telemetry to the services running on it, so application and platform views connect rather than living in separate tools. Dashboards track utilization and saturation, while monitors alert on thresholds, trends, and anomalies.
Where it gets hard
Modern infrastructure is ephemeral, and that breaks old assumptions. Containers live for minutes, autoscaling redraws the fleet hourly, and per host pricing models turn elasticity into a billing penalty. Tag hygiene decides whether any of the data is navigable, since untagged resources are unattributable costs and unownable alerts. And cloud provider metrics arrive with their own delays, granularities, and quirks that need reconciling with agent collected data.
Where Tsuga fits
Tsuga collects infrastructure telemetry through standard OpenTelemetry paths and discovers cloud resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP into a searchable inventory. Flat per GB pricing means autoscaling and container churn change your architecture, not your bill.
Related terms
- AWS CloudWatchAmazon CloudWatch is AWS's built in monitoring service: metrics, logs, alarms, and dashboards, with tracing through X-Ray, integrated by default with nearly every AWS service.
- eBPFeBPF is a Linux kernel technology that runs small, verified programs inside the kernel itself, attached to events like system calls, network packets, and scheduler activity.
- GaugeA gauge is a metric type that records a point in time value that can move in both directions: memory in use, queue depth, active connections, temperature, items in a cart.
- Kubernetes monitoringKubernetes monitoring is observability applied to Kubernetes clusters: the nodes, workloads, pods, and containers that run modern applications, plus the control plane that orchestrates them.
- MetricA metric is a named numeric measurement tracked over time, request counts, memory usage, response latency, carrying a type, a unit, and attributes that slice it into series.
- ObservabilityObservability is the ability to understand what is happening inside a system from the data it emits: its logs, metrics, and traces.
- OpenTelemetry CollectorThe OpenTelemetry Collector is a standalone process that receives telemetry from applications and infrastructure, transforms it, and exports it to one or more destinations.