Alerting Systems vs Manual Monitoring

Developers should learn and use alerting systems to ensure high availability and performance of production applications, as they help detect issues like server downtime, high latency, or error spikes before they impact users meets developers should learn manual monitoring for scenarios where automated systems are unavailable, during initial development phases to understand system behavior, or in legacy environments with limited tooling. Here's our take.

Alerting Systems

Nice Pick

Developers should learn and use alerting systems to ensure high availability and performance of production applications, as they help detect issues like server downtime, high latency, or error spikes before they impact users

Pros

• They are essential in microservices architectures and cloud environments where manual monitoring is impractical, and are widely used in SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) teams for on-call rotations and incident management
• Related to: monitoring, observability

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Manual Monitoring

Developers should learn manual monitoring for scenarios where automated systems are unavailable, during initial development phases to understand system behavior, or in legacy environments with limited tooling

Pros

• It's crucial for troubleshooting immediate issues, gaining hands-on insights into system performance, and as a fallback when automated monitoring fails, ensuring operational resilience and quick problem resolution
• Related to: log-analysis, system-administration

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

These tools serve different purposes. Alerting Systems is a tool while Manual Monitoring is a methodology. We picked Alerting Systems based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

Alerting Systems wins

Based on overall popularity. Alerting Systems is more widely used, but Manual Monitoring excels in its own space.