Monitoring and Observability in Production

You Can't Fix What You Can't See

Shipping code is only half the job. Without proper monitoring, you're flying blind. Observability means understanding your system's internal state from its external outputs — logs, metrics, and traces.

The Three Pillars

Logs tell you what happened. Metrics tell you how much and how fast. Traces tell you where time was spent across services. Together, they give you a complete picture.

Alerting Without Alert Fatigue

The key to effective alerting is being specific. Alert on symptoms (high error rate, slow response times), not causes (high CPU, low memory). Set thresholds based on user impact, not arbitrary numbers.

Our Stack

We use Sentry for error tracking, Grafana + Prometheus for metrics, and structured JSON logs with correlation IDs for distributed tracing. This combination covers 95% of debugging scenarios.