In most cases monitoring is an automated process, where monitoring tools (agents)/systems are hosted on the technology configuration items under the scope of Event Management. These agents continuously monitor the technology configuration items and the services running on them. Many of these technology configuration items are setup to generate standard events (based on the designer’s experience of what is required to operate the CI), with the ability to generate additional types of events, by ‘turning on’ the relevant event generation mechanism.

Once event notifications are generated, these are detected by an agent running on the same device. In some cases, event notifications may be proprietary, in which case only the manufacturer’s management tools can be used to detect events. Most technology configuration items, however generate event notifications using open standards such as SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). In case of Infra engagements, these events could later be communicated to a monitoring console.