Developers Need Monitoring Too

Erik Näslund, a back-end developer and operations specialist, shares his insights on the importance of effective monitoring in software development across companies of varying sizes. He highlights the challenges faced when monitoring is seen as costly or complex, often leading to oversight and customer-reported issues. Näslund describes experiences from different company sizes, noting that smaller teams often neglect monitoring due to resource constraints, while larger companies struggle with integrating flexible systems that are easy for developers to use. He emphasizes the necessity of both application performance management (APM) and real user monitoring (RUM) in ensuring website availability and diagnosing bottlenecks. Näslund introduces a hypothetical game, Awesome Space Battle, to illustrate the need for comprehensive monitoring, including event monitoring to ensure critical processes run smoothly. He advocates for integrating on-call schedules and notification systems to address issues promptly and stresses the importance of making monitoring tools accessible to developers, who are best suited to identify what needs to be monitored. Ultimately, Näslund argues that effective monitoring should be a fundamental part of the development process, akin to unit testing, to preemptively address potential issues and maintain application reliability.