Alerting vs Manual Monitoring

Developers should learn and use alerting to ensure system reliability, availability, and performance by proactively identifying and addressing problems 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

Nice Pick

Developers should learn and use alerting to ensure system reliability, availability, and performance by proactively identifying and addressing problems before they impact users

Pros

• It is essential in DevOps, SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), and production environments for incident response, reducing downtime, and maintaining service-level agreements (SLAs)
• 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 is a concept while Manual Monitoring is a methodology. We picked Alerting based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

Alerting wins

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