Monitoring is a process of observing and tracking activities and progress. It is a critical component of any successful project, intervention, public policy, or program. Monitoring is a continuous assessment that aims to provide all stakeholders with early detailed information on the progress or delay of the ongoing assessed activities. It is an oversight of the activitys implementation stage, and its purpose is to determine if the outputs, deliveries, and schedules planned have been reached so that action can be taken to correct the deficiencies as quickly as possible. Monitoring is a short-term assessment and does not take into consideration the outcomes and impact, unlike the evaluation process, which also assesses the outcomes and sometimes longer-term impact.
Monitoring is an ongoing, continuous process that requires the collection of data at multiple points throughout the program or project cycle, including at the beginning to provide a baseline. Its purpose is to permit stakeholders to make informed decisions regarding the effectiveness of programs and the efficient use of resources. Monitoring is the systematic and routine collection of information from projects and programs for four main purposes: to learn from experiences to improve practices and activities in the future, to document results, processes, and experiences to be used as a basis to steer decision-making and learning processes, to check progress against plans, and to provide the basis for evaluative analysis.
Monitoring is best thought of as part of an integrated Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) system that brings together various activities relating to gathering and using data. Understanding the various stakeholders and their needs for monitoring information is essential in designing or refining a monitoring and evaluation system. Regardless of who carries out the monitoring function, there are several overlapping aspects and considerations.
In the context of IT, monitoring is a process that gathers metrics on the operations of an IT environment. Organizations use IT monitoring to gather metrics from their hardware and software to ensure everything functions as expected and to help detect and resolve IT-related problems. Basic monitoring is performed through device operation checks, while more advanced monitoring provides granular views on operational statuses, such as average response times, number of application instances, error and request rates, CPU usage, and software application availability.
