Introduction

Monitoring is crucial for schools and nonprofits, and there are dozens of use cases for how nonprofits and schools can implement monitoring. This article will explore them and show you how to start monitoring your organization using MetricFire. 

We'll also briefly examine EnglishScore, a real customer's use case for monitoring their educational application.

We offer up to 40% off your monitoring bill for schools and nonprofits when you switch to MetricFire. Schedule a chat with our team to get a quote!

Note: The use cases below are examples based on custom metrics. Your organization's team must create the custom metrics and send them to a platform like MetricFire.

School Monitoring Use Cases

Ensuring that schools have monitoring in place is so important. Whatever the metrics, monitoring is an important part of our educational systems.

There are many potential use cases for your school. Below, we will go over some of them and show you some example Graphite metrics for each use case.

Safety

Some important use cases for schools would be:

• Locating students and personnel—It is vital to have a system that allows you to know where staff and students are. If a student, especially a child, leaves the premises, you need to know immediately.

  • Here is an example metric you can use to monitor the comings and goings of people within the school:

  • School.schoolbuildingnumber.locationcode.studentid

• Communication and Bullying- Many schools use applications to communicate with students and prevent cyber bullying. You can create custom metrics like this example:

  • Applicationname.schoolid.user.bullying.reported

Scheduling

• Schedules—Monitoring the number of students enrolled in different classes can help you determine where to invest more resources.

• School.class.students.enrolled

Security

• Databases—Databases containing the personal information of students and staff need to be secured, and monitoring in place allows you to relax. For this use case, you would want some basic uptime performance metrics.

• Security System- If your school has a security system, it is important to know whether it functions correctly. This use case would likely require network and performance monitoring so you could see whether your security system is functioning and, if not, where the problem is.

Educational Applications

With any educational application, you will want performance and user metrics to see if your app functions properly and make upgrades or improvements that users expect.

One of our customers, EnglishScore, created an app for non-English speakers to learn proper English and grammar. Read more about their use case and why they chose MetricFire here.

EnglishScore implemented monitoring because they wanted to incorporate it into their best practices. They chose to use MetricFire because they were using Heroku and liked our add-on, Hosted Graphite. They decided to stick with Heroku and Hosted Graphite by extension because it was much easier than moving their application to AWS. 

After moving to a dedicated monitoring account, EnglishScore has more control over its metrics and has enjoyed easy alerting and beautiful Grafana dashboards. 

MetricFire can also help you with your use case! Read this blog to learn more about getting started with Heroku monitoring.

Nonprofits Monitoring Use Cases

Now that we've looked at some example use cases for schools, let's explore some nonprofit use cases.

Manage Volunteers and Schedules

• Applications—Many Nonprofits use apps to keep track of their volunteers' schedules so they are not over or understaffed. 

• Here is an example metric related to this use case when someone updates the schedule:

• Applicationname.schedulechanges.unavailable

Fundraising and Finance Management

• Many nonprofits require funding and must monitor their budgets closely to allocate funds appropriately. They monitor their finance management tools and applications with monitoring solutions like MetricFire. 

• If you are interested in this use case or another listed use case, schedule a time to talk to our team!

Measure Results

• Nonprofits also want to see the results of their efforts. For example, if you are feeding the homeless, seeing how many people get food on a daily basis allows you to schedule charity work more efficiently and give your donors real results on how you are making an impact.

The use cases above are just a few examples of why monitoring is important for schools and nonprofits. You also need to see what Graphite metrics would look like in these use cases. Book a call here to see how MetricFire could work for your organization!

How to use MetricFire for your Full Potential

MetricFire would love to help you monitor your school or nonprofit. Whether simple application monitoring or nitty-gritty custom metrics, we can save you time and money on your monitoring so you have complete visibility.

Sign up today!

Sending Custom Metrics to MetricFire

This section will show you how to create a custom metric. Custom metrics are tailor-made by you to fit your exact use case. Custom metrics can do anything you need, but setting them up has unique challenges.

• Creating them can take time and effort. Rather than using an agent, you must create custom metrics and configure them to send to MetricFire.

• Custom metrics are unique. While this makes them great for your use case, no one else will have the same infrastructure or metrics so that no one can offer support. When you have a general application use case, using an agent like Telegraf makes more sense.

To send custom metrics to MetricFire, you first need to add the metric to your application database. In the example below, we use Ruby.

Next, you would configure sending UDP metrics to MetricFire using the following:

require 'socket'

sock = UDPSocket.new

sock.send "YOUR-API-KEY.custom.application.metric 1.2\n", 0, "carbon.hostedgraphite.com", 2003

Conclusion

This article explored the importance of monitoring for schools and nonprofits and highlighted use cases, including safety, security, volunteer management, and more. Whether you're ensuring the safety of students, securing sensitive data, or managing nonprofit operations efficiently, monitoring plays a critical role in understanding your infrastructure and applications.

We also looked at how MetricFire can help organizations like EnglishScore by offering custom metrics, easy integration, and seamless monitoring solutions tailored to unique needs. If you want to streamline your operations and save on monitoring costs, MetricFire offers up to 40% off for schools and nonprofits. Book a call with our team today to get started!