Monitoring and Observability
Monitoring and Observability is a set of practices and tools used to understand the health, performance, and behavior of software systems in production. Monitoring involves collecting and analyzing predefined metrics and logs to detect issues, while observability extends this by enabling exploration of unknown unknowns through logs, metrics, and traces. It helps teams ensure reliability, troubleshoot problems, and optimize system performance.
Developers should learn and use monitoring and observability to maintain system reliability, quickly diagnose and resolve incidents, and improve user experience. It is essential for modern distributed systems, microservices architectures, and cloud-native applications where traditional monitoring falls short. Use cases include detecting performance bottlenecks, tracking error rates, understanding user behavior, and meeting service-level objectives (SLOs).