Fundamentals of Monitoring

What is Monitoring?

Monitoring involves systematically collecting, tracking, and analyzing data points about an application’s performance, availability, and health status. Monitoring is crucial for maintaining service reliability, performance optimization, and troubleshooting.

Importance in DevOps

• Proactive detection of issues before they escalate.
• Enable informed decision-making for capacity planning.
• Facilitate faster incident resolution.

Key Metrics for Monitoring

• Latency: Response times (e.g., average and percentile latency metrics).
• Throughput: Requests per second or transactions per second.
• Error Rate: Percentage or rate of failed requests.
• Resource Utilization: CPU, memory, disk, network usage.

Setting up Effective Alerts

• Alerts should be actionable and informative.
• Best practices include threshold-based alerts and anomaly detection.
• Tools: Prometheus Alertmanager, Grafana alerts, PagerDuty, OpsGenie.

Logging Practices

Purpose of Logging

Logs are records of events generated by applications and infrastructure, essential for debugging, auditing, and compliance. Effective logging provides a transparent view of system behavior over time.