any folder(s) that have IRIS/Cache databases and other components (WIJ, journals) should be excluded from any antivirus/defender. See: Configuring Third-Party Software to Work in Conjunction with InterSystems Products | System Administration Guide | InterSystems IRIS Data Platform 2025.3

I would also exclude those from any indexing services, which will leave a good bandwidth & throughput to IRIS/Cache itself.

Depending on your server (on-prem or cloud) and the disks that you use, it might help to segregate IRIS/Cache databases and other components (WIJ, journals) across different disks.
 

Thank you so much for your recognition (!)

to feed any monitoring system best is to use: /api/monitor/metrics
if you enable interoperability monitoring, you should have: "iris_interop_hosts" which will have "status" (ok, Inactive etc.) per any host in any production.
you may also look into the property "Enabled" in class: Ens_Config.Item
if this is not enough, and you need your own code, than do a "user defined metric" than can be added to the /api/monitor/metrics results