At UDS last week there was another "Testing in Ubuntu" session. During the event I gave a brief presentation on monitoring and testability. The thesis was that there are a lot of parallels between monitoring and testing, so many that it's worth thinking of monitoring as a type of testing at times. Due to that great monitoring requires a testable system, as well as thinking about monitoring right at the start to build a monitorable system as well as a testable one.
You can watch a video of the talk here. (Thanks to the video team for recording it and getting it online quickly.)
I have two main questions. Firstly, what are the conventional names for the "passive" and "active" monitoring that I describe? Seecondly, do you agree with me about monitoring?