Company
Date Published
Author
Michelle Scharlock
Word count
1186
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Modern applications often employ a complex architecture of microservices, serverless technologies, and containers to ensure seamless customer experiences, but this can lead to tangled knots when problems arise. To address performance issues quickly, observability practices are necessary to identify the root cause of problems. While log monitoring is widely used, it may not provide enough insight on its own, particularly in complex or hybrid environments where setting up tools requires time and resources that could be spent elsewhere. Instrumentation, which involves adding code to track the inner state of an application, provides broader information about service operations and behavior, including metrics, events, logs, and traces. This approach offers immediate visibility into an application's performance, allows for quick problem-solving, and enables monitoring of complex environments. Relying solely on log monitoring is not recommended, as it may lead to missed insights and delayed troubleshooting.