Monitoring - Be the First to Know
Comprehensive monitoring of your systems will make you aware of problems before your cutomers do
Why Monitor
Monitoring allows you to be notified when there are issues with your systems. You want to be informed of these issues before your customers do so you can address them. Ideally, you have monitors in place that make you aware of issues before they become critical. The point is you want to prevent downtime and a bad experience for your customers.
What to Monitor
Everything! Well that may be too much to bite off at first, but eventually you will get there. If you can’t monitor everything right away, I suggest using synthetic checks to at least verify that your service is up and running. There are many tools for this such as Runscope, Pingdom and New Relic. But you should also be able to easily monitor your system resources such as CPU and memory usage. There are even more tools for this, but Datadog has worked out great for us. It provides a large set of monitors right out of the box.