Infrastructure Monitoring vs Basic Logging

Developers should learn infrastructure monitoring to build resilient, scalable applications and participate in DevOps/SRE practices meets developers should learn and use basic logging to diagnose issues in production environments where debugging tools are unavailable, track application flow for performance optimization, and maintain audit trails for security and compliance. Here's our take.

Infrastructure Monitoring

Nice Pick

Developers should learn infrastructure monitoring to build resilient, scalable applications and participate in DevOps/SRE practices

Pros

• It's essential for troubleshooting production issues, capacity planning, and ensuring high availability in microservices or cloud-native architectures
• Related to: observability, apm-application-performance-monitoring

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Basic Logging

Developers should learn and use basic logging to diagnose issues in production environments where debugging tools are unavailable, track application flow for performance optimization, and maintain audit trails for security and compliance

Pros

• It is essential for any non-trivial application, especially in distributed systems, web services, and long-running processes where real-time monitoring is critical
• Related to: structured-logging, log-aggregation

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

Use Infrastructure Monitoring if: You want it's essential for troubleshooting production issues, capacity planning, and ensuring high availability in microservices or cloud-native architectures and can live with specific tradeoffs depend on your use case.

Use Basic Logging if: You prioritize it is essential for any non-trivial application, especially in distributed systems, web services, and long-running processes where real-time monitoring is critical over what Infrastructure Monitoring offers.

The Bottom Line

Infrastructure Monitoring wins

Developers should learn infrastructure monitoring to build resilient, scalable applications and participate in DevOps/SRE practices