Monitoring and Alerting
Monitoring and alerting is a software engineering practice that involves continuously observing system performance, health, and behavior to detect issues and notify relevant personnel. It typically uses tools to collect metrics, logs, and traces from applications and infrastructure, then applies rules to trigger alerts when predefined thresholds are breached or anomalies occur. This enables proactive incident response and ensures system reliability, availability, and performance.
Developers should learn and implement monitoring and alerting to maintain operational excellence in production environments, especially for distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-native applications. It is critical for detecting failures, performance degradation, security threats, and capacity issues early, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and preventing downtime. Use cases include application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure health checks, business metric tracking, and compliance auditing.