Proactive monitoring is an approach that shifts focus from reacting to system issues to anticipating and addressing potential problems before they escalate into outages or data loss. This strategy involves establishing a healthy baseline for systems by understanding business cycles and expected resource usage, which helps in identifying deviations that may signal upcoming issues. It emphasizes the importance of aligning IT practices with business needs, ensuring security by preventing issues before they arise, and maintaining robust infrastructure through constant monitoring and failover solutions. Additionally, it highlights the necessity of keeping communication channels operational and continuously refining monitoring configurations to adapt to the evolving environment.