Monitoring & Observability

You cannot improve what you cannot measure. These guides cover the four pillars of a modern observability stack — metrics, dashboards, logs and alerting — with configuration you can copy straight into production.

Every guide is written against the current release line and verified against the upstream documentation:

What you will learn

• Prometheus — install the server, define scrape jobs, write recording and alerting rules.
• Grafana — connect data sources, build dashboards and turn metrics into actionable alerts.
• ELK Stack — deploy Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana and ship structured logs to them.
• Nagios — install the core, define host and service checks and route notifications.

Observability checklist

1. Instrument the four golden signals — latency, traffic, errors and saturation
2. Alert on symptoms users feel, not on causes
3. Keep an eye on the cost of retention before scaling logs
4. Correlate metrics and logs with a shared trace or request identifier
5. Test your alerts regularly with a synthetic check