What is Monitoring & Logging?
Monitoring & Logging are two essential practices for understanding the behavior and performance of your applications and infrastructure. They work together to provide a complete picture of your system’s health:
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Monitoring: The process of systematically collecting and analyzing metrics (numerical data points) that reflect the state of your systems and applications. This includes metrics like CPU usage, memory consumption, network traffic, error rates, response times, and more. Monitoring helps you track performance trends, identify anomalies, and receive alerts when predefined thresholds are exceeded.
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Logging: The process of recording events that occur within your applications and systems. Log files contain a chronological record of activities, including errors, warnings, informational messages, and debug information. Logs provide valuable context for troubleshooting issues, understanding user behavior, and auditing system activity.
Why Monitoring & Logging is Essential for a Business Website and How It Works
In today’s digital world, a website’s performance and reliability directly impact user experience, customer satisfaction, and ultimately, business success. Monitoring & Logging are no longer optional; they are crucial for maintaining a healthy and high-performing website.
Monitoring & Logging work by collecting data from various sources (servers, applications, databases, network devices) and consolidating it into a centralized system. This system allows you to visualize the data through dashboards, set up alerts based on predefined thresholds, and perform in-depth analysis to identify patterns, trends, and the root cause of issues. For example, if your website experiences a sudden spike in response time, monitoring will detect this anomaly, and logging will provide the detailed information needed to pinpoint the cause (e.g., a database query slowdown, a code bug, or a network issue). This enables proactive problem-solving and minimizes downtime.
