All of this adds up to greater adoption of monitoring tools and services. As much as we can script some of them, integrating with cloud and on-premise monitoring tools can help us achieve more in less time.

The metrics that we keep a track of should be the ones that either:

• Detect failures
• Prevent failures

Failure detection is a reactive process, where we should have clear protocols in place for what happens when each of the failure detection flags go off. For example, what should the recovery steps be if we lose a server, a replica set, or a shard?

Failure prevention on the other hand is a proactive process, designed to help us catch early problems before they become a potential source of failure in the future. For example, CPU/storage/memory usage should be actively monitored with yellow and red thresholds and clear processes put in place as to what we should do in the event we reach either threshold.