Unveiling the Jungle Call: Lessons in Monitoring from the Wild
We recently went on a Jungle Safari trip to Tiger Reserves and experienced 7 Safaris over a period of 5 days. In every Safari, the common element was a Jungle Call — the distinct and resonant sounds made by animals like deer, langur, birds etc when a Tiger is on the move. As these calls indicate the likelihood of a Tiger sighting in the vicinity, the protocol involves chasing the call and patiently waiting at a potential location where the Tiger might emerge. In one of the Safaris, we chased the Jungle Call, waited for about 20 minutes, but unfortunately, the Tiger didn’t make an appearance. Our Safari guide who had over 30 years of experience in the Jungle, directed our gypsy driver to explore another area where that particular tiger usually rests during the day. And voila! His efforts were rewarded and we sighted two Tigers at that location.
Trust me, this wasn’t to boast about the unbelievable Tiger sighting we had!
It instantly reminded me of the alarms we setup in the monitoring systems. When a problem starts brewing up (a Tiger on the move) and manifests into symptoms, the pre-configured alarms pick them up and go-off just like the Jungle call. Support teams then look into these alarms and take necessary actions. However, similar to misleading Jungle Calls, sometimes the alerts can be false or misleading, not pinpointing the exact problem area. Then, what should one do to safeguard their system? Like our guide, have a robust health check hygiene in place, so that the expert eyes can spot the problems before they become an incident. These health checks can either be manual or automated (wherever possible). Though it may sound humble, the benefits are significant. Try it out yourself and you will see a reduction in incidents overtime. Dedicate time to outline the parameters that will be checked in the health check, how the issues will be reported and who is responsible for taking actions. Without these in place, health checks won’t be effective. Typical metrics to monitor in health checks are status of essential processes, infrastructure health, connectivity to upstream and downstream systems, transaction rates and any defined SLOs. Plan carefully to ensure the checks are thorough yet manageable for the team to perform on a daily basis.
