Definition
Monitoring & Observability
The tools and practices that let you understand what your application is doing in production — from error rates to response times to resource usage.
Monitoring and observability encompass the systems that give you visibility into your running application. Monitoring tracks predefined metrics (error rates, response times, CPU usage) and alerts when thresholds are breached. Observability goes deeper — using structured logging, distributed tracing, and metrics to answer questions you didn't anticipate. Tools like Datadog, Grafana, Sentry, and OpenTelemetry form the modern observability stack. Without these systems, you discover production issues when users complain, not when they happen. AI-generated codebases almost never include monitoring, leaving founders blind to problems until they become crises.
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