Metrics Monitoring
Metrics monitoring is the practice of collecting, tracking, and analyzing quantitative data about system performance, application behavior, and infrastructure health in real-time or near-real-time. It involves using specialized tools to gather metrics like CPU usage, memory consumption, request latency, error rates, and business KPIs, enabling teams to detect issues, optimize performance, and ensure reliability. This process is fundamental to observability, providing insights into how systems operate under various conditions.
Developers should learn and use metrics monitoring to proactively identify performance bottlenecks, troubleshoot incidents quickly, and maintain high availability in production environments. It is essential for modern DevOps and SRE practices, particularly in microservices architectures or cloud-native applications where distributed systems require comprehensive visibility. Use cases include setting up alerts for abnormal behavior, capacity planning based on historical trends, and validating the impact of code deployments through A/B testing or canary releases.