Monitoring wisdom

I don't remember when and where I read this statement. I just know that I was still in my training as an IT professional. Judging by that it must have been the late 2000s or early 2010s. The statement was the following: Every metric you monitor will improve. This is a warning. I don't know why I still remember it. Maybe because my final project for my vocational final examination was the design and set up of a monitoring system for my employer. And I still have some sort of affinity or inclination for the whole monitoring topic. Only later when I started working at a big German telecommunications provider I understood the second part of this statement to its fullest. When I, before, thought of meticulous colleagues deleting too many files to free up enough disk space in order to make that "disk usage" check displaying a bright green "OK" again, I started to learn of the wonderful world of Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. I saw how badly formulated bonus-goals led to some…