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Monitoring & Observability Guide

Build production-grade observability stacks with Prometheus, Grafana, logging, and distributed tracing. From setup to scale.

Getting Started Prometheus Grafana Logging Tracing Alerting

What is Observability?

Observability is the ability to understand the internal state of a system by examining its external outputs. Unlike traditional monitoring that focuses on known failure modes, observability enables you to ask arbitrary questions about your system's behavior.

The three pillars of observability are metrics (numerical data points), logs (discrete events), and traces (request flows across services). This guide covers all three, plus alerting, dashboarding, and best practices for production environments.

Core Observability Tools

The essential tools for building modern monitoring stacks

Prometheus

Industry-standard metrics collection and alerting toolkit for cloud-native environments.

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Grafana

Powerful visualization and dashboarding platform for all your observability data.

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OpenTelemetry

Vendor-neutral observability framework for traces, metrics, and logs.

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Getting Started with Observability

Fundamentals of monitoring and observability practices

Prometheus Monitoring

Metrics collection, PromQL, and alerting with Prometheus

Grafana Dashboards & Visualization

Build powerful dashboards and visualizations

Logging & Log Management

Centralized logging with Loki, ELK, and Fluentd

Distributed Tracing

Trace requests across microservices with Jaeger and OpenTelemetry

Alerting & Incident Response

Set up effective alerting and on-call practices

Articles coming soon.

Related Guides

Continue your learning journey with these comprehensive guides

Kubernetes Guide

Deploy and manage monitoring in Kubernetes environments with Prometheus Operator and Grafana.

Terraform Guide

Provision monitoring infrastructure as code with Terraform modules.

DevOps Guide

Integrate monitoring into your CI/CD pipelines and DevOps workflows.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about monitoring and observability

What is the difference between monitoring and observability?
Monitoring tracks predefined metrics and alerts on known failure modes. Observability goes further, allowing you to ask arbitrary questions about your system's internal state using metrics, logs, and traces. Observability helps you debug unknown-unknowns.
Should I use Prometheus or Grafana for monitoring?
They serve different purposes and are often used together. Prometheus collects and stores metrics with powerful querying (PromQL) and alerting. Grafana visualizes data from multiple sources including Prometheus. Most teams use Prometheus for metrics collection and Grafana for dashboards.
What is OpenTelemetry and why should I use it?
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral framework for collecting telemetry data (traces, metrics, logs). It prevents vendor lock-in by providing a single instrumentation that can export to any backend. This makes it easier to switch observability tools without re-instrumenting your applications.
How do I reduce alert fatigue?
Focus on symptom-based alerts (user impact) rather than cause-based alerts. Set appropriate thresholds with hysteresis to prevent flapping. Use alert grouping and routing. Regularly review and tune alerts, removing those that don't lead to action. Implement SLO-based alerting for better signal-to-noise ratio.

Need Help with Observability?

Our monitoring experts have built observability stacks for 100+ organizations. Let us help you gain visibility into your systems.

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