External Monitoring vs Internal Monitoring

Developers should use external monitoring to ensure their applications are accessible and performant for users globally, especially for customer-facing web services, APIs, or cloud-based systems meets developers should implement internal monitoring to maintain system reliability, quickly diagnose production issues, and meet service-level objectives (slos). Here's our take.

External Monitoring

Nice Pick

Developers should use external monitoring to ensure their applications are accessible and performant for users globally, especially for customer-facing web services, APIs, or cloud-based systems

Pros

• It is critical for detecting downtime, slow response times, or functional failures from a user's perspective, enabling proactive incident response and SLA compliance
• Related to: application-performance-monitoring, infrastructure-monitoring

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Internal Monitoring

Developers should implement internal monitoring to maintain system reliability, quickly diagnose production issues, and meet service-level objectives (SLOs)

Pros

• It is essential for distributed systems, microservices architectures, and cloud-native applications where traditional external monitoring may miss internal failures or performance degradation
• Related to: metrics-collection, logging

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

These tools serve different purposes. External Monitoring is a tool while Internal Monitoring is a concept. We picked External Monitoring based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

External Monitoring wins

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