Understanding your responsibilities when using IBM Cloud Monitoring

Learn about the management responsibilities and terms and conditions that you have when you use IBM Cloud Monitoring. For a high-level view of the service types in IBM Cloud and the breakdown of responsibilities between the customer and IBM for each type, see Shared responsibilities for IBM Cloud offerings.

Review the following sections for the specific responsibilities for you and for IBM when you use IBM Cloud Monitoring. For the overall terms of use, see IBM Cloud Terms and Notices.

Incident and operations management

You and IBM share responsibilities for the set up and maintenance of your IBM Cloud Monitoring service instance for monitoring your application and infrastructure workloads. You are responsible for incident and operations management of your application data.

Responsibilities for incident and operations
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
Monitor incidents	Provide notifications for planned maintenance, security bulletins, or unplanned outages.	Set preferences to receive emails about platform notifications. Monitor the IBM Cloud status page for general announcements.
Maintain IBM Cloud high availability SLA	Operate the Continuous Delivery service in accordance with the IBM Cloud Public Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Provide high availability capabilities	Provide capabilities, such as IBM-owned infrastructure in multizone regions (MZR), to meet local access and low latency requirements for each supported region.	Use the list of available regions to plan for and create new instances of the service.
Monitor monitoring agents	Provide images and instructions for how to install monitoring agents in environments that you want to monitor, such as Kubernetes, Linux, and Red Hat OpenShift.	Install and configure monitoring agents. Monitor that the agents are running in your environment, for example, by using monitoring alerts.
Deliver platform metrics	Deliver platform metrics for Monitoring-enabled services to the monitoring instance that collects platform metrics and is located in the region where the platform metrics are generated.	Configure 1 monitoring instance per region to collect platform metrics in that region.

Change management

You and IBM share responsibilities for keeping IBM Cloud Monitoring service components at the latest version. You are responsible for change management of your monitoring agents, dashboards, and alert definitions.

Responsibilities for change management
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
Update the IBM Cloud Monitoring service	Provide regular updates to the service with new features, fixes for defects, and security fixes.
Update the monitoring agent image that is hosted in IBM Cloud	Provide regular updates to the monitoring agent image with new features, fixes to defects, and security fixes. Document changes in the Agent release notes	Update the agent to keep it up to date as new versions are made available.
Update default dashboards	Update the default dashboards as requirements change.	Update custom dashboards and track changes by using your own change management process.
Update pre-defined alert definitions	Update the default alert definitions as requirements change.	Update custom alert definitions and track changes by using your own change management process.
Track versions of custom dashboards, alerts, notifications, and teams		Use your own change management process to control versions of monitoring resources such as dashboards, alert definitions, teams, and notifications.

Identity and access management

IBM is responsible for the security and compliance of IBM Cloud Monitoring. You are responsible for defining the IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to control which users within your account have access to the monitoring data.

Responsibilities for identity and access management
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
Manage platform permissions	Allow administrators to control access to manage resources in the IBM Cloud.	Grant, revoke, and manage access to service instances by using IAM.
Manage service permissions	Allow administrators to control access to work with the IBM Cloud Monitoring.	Grant, revoke, and manage access to monitoring features by using IAM.
Control Monitoring data access	Allow administrators to control access to metrics data and metadata through Sysdig teams.	Grant, revoke, and manage access to monitoring data by using IAM.

Learn more about controlling access through IAM.

Security and regulation compliance

IBM is responsible for the security and compliance of IBM Cloud Monitoring. You are responsible for ensuring that metrics, that contain regulated data, are not provided to the IBM Cloud Monitoring service.

Responsibilities for security and regulation compliance
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
Meet security and compliance objectives	Maintain controls that are commensurate to supported industry compliance standards, such as SOC.	Ensure that regulated data is not provided to the IBM Cloud Monitoring service.

Disaster recovery

IBM is responsible for the recovery of IBM Cloud Monitoring components in case of disaster.

Responsibilities for disaster recovery
Task	IBM Responsibilities	Your Responsibilities
Service	Automatically recover and restart service components after any disaster event.
Data		Extract and save data, dashboards definitions, and alert definitions if you cannot afford for it to be lost in the event of an un-recoverable event. For more information, see Extracting metrics from a Monitoring instance by using the API.
Monitoring agent		Recovery of the Monitoring agents running in your environment should they be impacted by a disaster.