Question 1

What is the difference between monitoring and observability?

Accepted Answer

Monitoring tracks predefined metrics and alerts when thresholds are crossed. Observability means you can understand any system state from its outputs (logs, metrics, traces). Observability is deeper—you can debug unknown problems.

Question 2

What metrics should I monitor?

Accepted Answer

Start with the four golden signals: latency (response times), traffic (requests per second), errors (failure rate), and saturation (resource usage). These cover most performance issues. Add business metrics as needed.

Question 3

Datadog vs Grafana Cloud vs simpler tools?

Accepted Answer

Datadog is comprehensive but expensive at scale. Grafana Cloud is powerful and more affordable. For startups, start with simpler tools: Better Uptime for uptime, Logtail for logs. Add Datadog/Grafana when you need deep APM.

Question 4

What is APM (Application Performance Monitoring)?

Accepted Answer

APM tools like Datadog and New Relic instrument your code to trace requests through your system, measure function timing, and identify bottlenecks. More detailed than basic uptime monitoring.

Question 5

How do logs, metrics, and traces differ?

Accepted Answer

Logs are text records of events. Metrics are numeric measurements over time. Traces follow requests across services. Together they provide full observability. Most platforms combine all three.

Question 6

What should I alert on?

Accepted Answer

Alert on user-impacting issues: high error rates, slow response times, service downtime. Avoid alerting on every metric spike—leads to alert fatigue. Set meaningful thresholds that require action when triggered.

Question 7

How do I avoid alert fatigue?

Accepted Answer

Only alert when human action is needed. Set appropriate thresholds (not too sensitive). Use severity levels. Aggregate related alerts. Review and tune alerts regularly. If alerts are ignored, they're worse than useless.

Question 8

What is distributed tracing?

Accepted Answer

Following a request as it travels across multiple services. Traces show where time is spent at each step. Essential for debugging microservices. Tools like Datadog and Grafana Tempo provide tracing.

Question 9

How much does monitoring cost?

Accepted Answer

Varies wildly. Basic uptime monitoring is nearly free. Full APM like Datadog can cost hundreds to thousands per month based on hosts and data volume. Start simple, add capability as you scale.

Question 10

What is uptime monitoring?

Accepted Answer

Regularly pinging your site to verify it's accessible. Alerts when your site goes down. Better Uptime, Instatus, and many others provide this. Essential baseline monitoring—know immediately when things break.

Question 11

How do I monitor serverless functions?

Accepted Answer

Cloud providers (AWS, Vercel) provide basic function metrics. For deeper monitoring, use Datadog's serverless integration or dedicated tools. Track cold starts, execution time, and error rates.

Question 12

What is a service level objective (SLO)?

Accepted Answer

A target for service reliability: "99.9% of requests complete in under 200ms." SLOs quantify reliability goals. Track SLO compliance over time. Essential for mature operations but optional for early startups.

Question 13

How do I create useful dashboards?

Accepted Answer

Focus on actionable metrics. Group related metrics together. Use consistent time ranges. Add context (deployment markers, annotations). Dashboards should help you quickly assess system health and diagnose issues.

Question 14

Should I build dashboards or use prebuilt ones?

Accepted Answer

Start with prebuilt dashboards for your stack—most tools have templates. Customize based on your specific needs. Building from scratch takes time and you'll miss common metrics.

Question 15

What is log aggregation?

Accepted Answer

Collecting logs from all your services into one searchable place. Logtail, Papertrail, and Datadog logs aggregate logs. Much easier than SSH-ing into servers. Essential once you have multiple services or containers.

Question 16

How long should I retain monitoring data?

Accepted Answer

Keep high-resolution data (per-second) for days, aggregated data (per-hour) for months. Logs for 7-30 days typically. Longer retention costs more. Match retention to your debugging and compliance needs.

Question 17

What is synthetic monitoring?

Accepted Answer

Simulated user transactions from global locations—regularly running through key user flows. Catches issues before real users. Datadog, Checkly, and others offer this. Useful for critical user journeys.

Question 18

How do I monitor database performance?

Accepted Answer

Track query times, connection counts, and resource usage. Slow query logs identify optimization targets. Most managed databases have built-in monitoring. APM tools can trace database calls from your application.

I need to monitor my application performance

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