Alerting Systems
Alerting systems are software tools or platforms that monitor metrics, logs, or events from applications and infrastructure, and automatically notify relevant personnel (e.g., via email, SMS, or chat) when predefined thresholds or conditions are breached. They are a critical component of observability and DevOps practices, enabling proactive incident response and system reliability. These systems often integrate with monitoring tools like Prometheus or Datadog to trigger alerts based on real-time data.
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. 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.