Monitoring & Logging

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Monitoring & Logging

Observability helps you understand what your application is doing in production and detect problems before users do.

Three Pillars

Metrics - : numeric data over time (CPU, memory, request latency, error rate).
Logs - : text records of events and errors.
Traces - : follow a single request through multiple services.

Practical Monitoring

  • Log structured JSON so logs are easy to search.
  • Add health-check endpoints to load balancers and orchestrators.
  • Alert on symptoms users care about (latency, errors) not just server availability.
  • Use dashboards to spot trends.

Tools

Common choices include Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus/Grafana, AWS CloudWatch, and Sentry for error tracking.

Comprehension check

Answer all 3 questions correctly to unlock Submit.

1Which of the following is a metric?

2What is the main benefit of structured logging?

3What should production alerts primarily be based on?