Monitoring involves analyzing infrastructure issues and failures in both virtual and physical systems. As virtual systems increased, the number of systems needing monitoring also increased significantly. Monitoring is a key part of approaches like DevOps and SRE that focus on system reliability. It involves collecting metrics in real-time, logs about events and activities, and curated alerts based on metrics and logs within their proper context. Tools like Cloudwatch, Riemann, DataDog, Loggly, Splunk, ELK, and Bosun can help bring these facets of monitoring together.