Application monitoring and observability provide insights into system behavior, performance, and health. Modern tools track metrics, logs, and traces to diagnose issues quickly and optimize user experiences.

Three Pillars of Observability

• Metrics: Numerical measurements like response times, error rates, and resource usage over time.

• Logs: Detailed records of events, errors, and system activities for debugging and audit trails.

• Traces: End-to-end request paths through distributed systems showing performance bottlenecks.

Essential Monitoring Tools

Prometheus collects metrics with flexible querying, Grafana visualizes data with customizable dashboards, ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) manages log aggregation and search, Jaeger provides distributed tracing, and New Relic/Datadog offer all-in-one APM solutions.

Key Metrics to Track

Monitor response times and latency percentiles, error rates and exception counts, throughput and requests per second, resource utilization including CPU and memory, and user experience metrics like page load times.

Alerting Strategies

Set thresholds based on business impact, implement alert aggregation to prevent fatigue, create runbooks for common issues, use escalation policies for critical alerts, and conduct regular alert review to maintain relevance and reduce noise.

Best Practices

Instrument code for meaningful telemetry, use structured logging for better searchability, implement distributed tracing for microservices, establish SLOs and SLIs for service quality, and regularly review monitoring coverage to identify blind spots.