Monitoring in the Microservices Age

Microservices, driven by the rise of Docker and the DevOps movement, have become a favored method for building and deploying applications due to their agility and ease of management. Unlike monolithic architectures, microservices consist of multiple small application components, which increase the complexity of IT monitoring as they introduce more moving parts that need to be managed. While this added complexity requires robust incident management platforms capable of handling numerous alerts and correlating them effectively, it also provides a greater amount of data that can be leveraged to pinpoint and resolve issues more precisely. For instance, an alert from a monolithic application indicates a general problem, whereas microservices allow admins to target specific components without affecting the entire application. Despite the increased monitoring challenges, the scalability and agility offered by microservices make them a valuable approach, provided that organizations implement microservices-ready incident management solutions and workflows.