September 9, 2025
Improving IT Health, Performance, and Availability With Monitoring Governance
8 min read
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Key Takeaways
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In contrast to the many flavors of governance used for IT, such as data governance, audit and compliance, and governance and security, IT monitoring governance lacks a definition in many organizations. This is true even as teams have decades of experience monitoring the health, performance, and availability of applications, infrastructures, networks, and user experience.
Good monitoring governance “just sort of happens—naturally, organically.”
Not exactly!
For many enterprises, IT monitoring governance lacks a framework and clearly structured processes with thoughtfully defined roles, best practices, and tracking metrics. In this era of full-stack observability and connected everything, gaps in monitoring cause gaps in observability and understanding. These gaps pose problems in preserving the health, performance, and availability of assets in the IT estate.
Given the scale, connectedness, and business-critical nature of IT environments, enterprises benefit from a disciplined approach to monitoring governance.
Strong monitoring governance is no longer a nice to have. It’s a must. It should answer these types of questions:
- What is being monitored? What isn’t?
- Does our monitoring coverage (scope, depth, and granularity) align with business priorities?
- When things change in IT (for example, a new application update or infrastructure resource is deployed), is monitoring properly and swiftly applied in production?
- Are our current business apps and systems safe from failure and downtime?
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Unfortunately, given the speed of IT activities and advancement, it’s challenging for each IT team to consistently adhere to a monitoring plan. Then, when issues arise, teams play catch up and monitoring governance becomes secondary to issue remediation. In addition, organizations contend with the problems caused by production system failures or intolerable end user experiences, including lost business.
Investing time and effort in monitoring governance is one of the fastest and easiest methods to ensure business applications not only perform reliably but also scale optimally over time.
Healthcare and life sciences—real-world impact
One medical device manufacturing company unknowingly lost their ability to collect baseline data for several weeks due to a changed configuration. The team presumed the lack of notifications indicated that the system was healthy when it was not. The resulting outage had a negative impact on manufacturing and caused millions in lost revenue.
Defining monitoring governance: Understanding the current landscape
Monitoring governance is the discipline that turns overwhelming streams of raw data into clarity and control. It empowers IT teams to cut through the noise, see what truly matters, and act with precision—minimizing risk while improving business outcomes. Without it, monitoring data becomes chaos: a flood that hides critical signals, leaving organizations vulnerable and blind to the issues that matter most.
Monitoring governance may also be considered as a framework that prescribes monitoring coverage of IT systems and infrastructure to ensure teams can assess and maintain IT health, availability, performance, and scalability in alignment with business goals. When monitoring lacks governance, insights drown in noise.
Effective monitoring governance should be:
- Strategically aligned: To support the organization’s business strategy, risk mitigation, compliance requirements, customer experience goals, and operational efficiencies.
- Broadly applied: To cover business-critical IT assets across on-premises data centers, and hosted, hybrid cloud, and cloud-native environments.
- Flexible: To allow departments and business units to tailor monitoring to their specific needs, without compromising enterprise standards.
- Transparent and accountable: To foster trust across the IT organization with a monitoring plan that adapts as priorities and conditions evolve.
In addition to obvious challenges relating to the size, complexity, and dynamic nature of IT environments, organizations often resist or skip monitoring governance for several reasons. Here are a few:
- Timing of priorities: Monitoring governance never reaches priority #1 status. It exists as important work that is perpetually deferred since teams are not measured on monitoring governance.
- Internal politics: Strong monitoring governance creates transparency, which, some may fear, can expose deficiencies.
- Territorialism: Teams want to be the first to learn of problems on their own “turf,” rather than being identified by others as the cause of lost revenue, network latency, system failures, poor customer experience, and so on.
Retail—real-world impact
A large cloud-based enterprise that provides omni-channel operations for multiple retail brands experienced an outage during the holiday season. The outage was caused by server issues that occurred after updates were applied to production processes. While the issue only lasted minutes and affected a few store locations, the problem caused significant reputational damage and resulted in millions in lost revenue.
Benefits of monitoring governance: Why invest in monitoring governance now?
IT estates have grown larger and more complex, with more teams and technologies contributing to digital services and end user experiences. This fragmentation makes accountability more challenging and introduces new risks, making it likely teams will fail to monitor some important IT assets. Monitoring governance enables the IT organization to employ a more consistent, disciplined monitoring plan that reduces these risks and supports observability.
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Without strong observability and monitoring governance |
With strong observability and monitoring governance |
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Financial/ business impact |
Loss of business, revenue, and profits due to outages; regulatory fines; significant reputational damage; lost customers; and loss of goodwill. |
Substantially reduced risk of negative financial and business consequences due to inadequate monitoring. |
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Increased costs, heightened potential for hardware failures, and poor IT resourcing decisions. |
Lower costs, since issues can be found sooner and remediated more efficiently or pre-empted entirely. |
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Insufficient service-level protection, which may have life-and-death ramifications, for example, resulting in issues that have an impact on air traffic control, homeland security, and medical systems. Inferior service quality experienced by employees, partners, or external customers. |
Better monitoring governance improves monitoring and helps all IT teams ensure high quality service delivery. |
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Operational impact |
Impaired communication and collaboration between IT teams or between IT and business stakeholders. |
Excellent transparency, greater accountability, and improved collaboration across teams. |
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Less transparency and accountability: More escalations can lead to more blaming and scapegoating. Organization remains or becomes reactive. |
IT teams can have greater confidence that monitoring coverage is comprehensive. Less fire-fighting, fewer escalations. |
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Delays in identifying, triaging, and remediating issues that arise. |
Reduced observability gaps means teams can triage and remediate issues faster. |
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Decrease in the quality of healthcare services, transaction processing unexpectedly halted. |
With proactive end-user monitoring coverage, quality of services delivered is ensured. |
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All types of IT environments are at risk at all times. |
Operations can be less risk-averse and more open to required production changes. |
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First steps to improve observability and monitoring governance: Questions to ask
In many enterprises, there is tension between monitoring governance as constructive oversight or practice, and the practical day-to-day monitoring necessary to identify, triage, and remediate incidents. While some tension may be productive, it actually creates new risks and work for teams that lack clearly defined processes to resolve these important questions:
- How can we balance the costs and risks of over-monitoring versus costs and risks of insufficient monitoring?
- Who owns monitoring governance?
- What are the best measures of success? (SMART goals)
- Can we quantify trade-offs to management of over- and under-monitoring?
- How will we know we are doing a good job in striking the right balance?
Finance—real-world impact
For financial trading systems, sub-second differences in response can affect profits. Slowdowns in processing can quickly cause tremendous loss of revenue and missed opportunities.
Observability and monitoring governance: How should this work and where to start?
Monitoring technologies with modern observability capabilities—on their own—cannot fill gaps caused by inadequate monitoring governance. Monitoring governance requires the organization to commit to a framework with supportive processes that IT can adopt and refine over time, and that tap into the power of observability technologies.
Process considerations for strong monitoring governance include:
- Establishing monitoring governance leadership and ownership
- Establishing a simple RACI-based project management discipline
- Defining an achievable initial scope
- Monitoring governance integration with historical analysis of root causes and contributing factors
- Drafting a short list of key metrics teams can use to track progress
Monitoring governance to extend observability
With effective monitoring governance, full-stack observability spans every tier of the IT environment and is strengthened by the following assets:
- Executive dashboards—High-level visibility for decision-makers
- KPIs, baselines, and trend analysis—Actionable performance insights over time
- Static and dynamic thresholding—Precise, automated, and proactive alerting
- Rich notification systems—Ensuring the right people are informed at the outset
- Deep drill-down capabilities—Rapid access to root-cause details with context when needed
Public sector/armed services—real-world impact
System slowdowns or failures of scheduled jobs can put lives and missions at risk. Service personnel count on IT to maintain systems that are reliable and perform according to benchmarks,
accepted baselines, and performance standards.
The most valuable advice regarding monitoring governance is simply to get started as soon as possible. There is widespread acceptance that real-time, full-stack observability (FSO) is the new norm and what IT and business stakeholders really require. Unfortunately, without monitoring governance, FSO remains elusive and inefficient.
Monitoring governance is a key pillar of observability.
Establish strong monitoring governance in your organization. It will pay huge dividends for existing systems, and offer benefits with every change or new addition to your IT estate.
Next?
In part two of my short series on observability and monitoring governance, I focus on the process framework and offer some best practices.
Then, stay tuned for parts three and four, which will discuss the monitoring governance report in DX Unified Infrastructure Manager. I’ll outline how the trio of capabilities of baselining, KPIs, and thresholding contribute to monitoring governance, and how you can take advantage of these features immediately. Plus, I’ll offer additional tips to help you make additional progress with monitoring governance.
And, along the way, I’ll share more customer examples and insights.
Steve Danseglio
With over 25 years of expertise in IT, Steve Danseglio is a seasoned technical professional with a proven track record of supporting Fortune 500 clients through complex enterprise software solutions. He excels in driving customer success through a combination of technical proficiency and strategic vision. Steve has...
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