System Monitoring

Observability and Monitoring for Modern Systems In modern software, it is not enough to know if a service is up. You need to understand how it behaves under load, where bottlenecks lie, and how different parts interact. Monitoring watches for known signals, while observability is the ability to ask new questions of your data. Together they help you prevent outages and move faster with confidence. Three pillars of observability Metrics: numeric measures like latency, throughput, error rate, and resource use. They give a fast view of health and trends. Logs: timestamped records that describe events, errors, and decisions. They help you diagnose what went wrong. Traces: end-to-end paths through a request as it travels across services. They reveal dependencies and timing issues. A practical system combines all three. Metrics show the big picture, logs provide context, and traces link the pieces to the user flow. ...

Logging, Monitoring and Observability in Systems Logging, monitoring and observability are the three pillars of reliable software systems. Logging records events as they happen, monitoring watches the health and capacity of services, and observability ties these signals together so you can explain what went wrong and why. Used together, they reduce downtime and speed up recovery for teams of any size. Logging Logging is your first source of truth. Do not log everything; log what matters in a structured format. Use fields that stay consistent across services: timestamp, level, service, trace_id, span_id, request_id, and a clear message. Example: ts=2025-09-22T14:30:00Z level=INFO svc=auth trace=abc123 span=def456 msg=‘user login’ user_id=987. ...