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Monitoring

Collections of tools or software used to monitor your cloud services.

Name Description Link
Grafana Is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. Grafana
Prometheus Is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit. Prometheus
VictoriaMetrics Is a fast, cost-saving, and scalable solution for monitoring and managing time series data by Nokia. VictoriaMetrics

Monitoring Fundamentals

Monitoring Types

  • Infrastructure monitoring - Servers, networks, storage
  • Application monitoring - Application performance and behavior
  • Business monitoring - Business metrics and KPIs
  • Security monitoring - Security events and threats

Monitoring Stack Components

Data Collection

  • Metrics collection - Numerical measurements over time
  • Log aggregation - Centralized log collection and storage
  • Distributed tracing - Request flow across services
  • Synthetic monitoring - Proactive testing and monitoring

Data Storage

  • Time series databases - Optimized for metric data
  • Log storage - Scalable log storage solutions
  • Data retention - Policies for data lifecycle management
  • Data compression - Efficient storage utilization

Visualization and Alerting

  • Dashboards - Visual representation of metrics
  • Alerting systems - Proactive issue notification
  • Reporting - Regular performance reports
  • Anomaly detection - Automated issue identification

Best Practices

Metrics Strategy

  • Choose meaningful metrics - Focus on business-relevant indicators
  • Avoid metric explosion - Don't monitor everything
  • Use labels wisely - Organize metrics with appropriate labels
  • Set up SLIs/SLOs - Define service level indicators and objectives

Dashboard Design

  • User-focused dashboards - Design for specific audiences
  • Hierarchical structure - From high-level to detailed views
  • Consistent styling - Use consistent colors and layouts
  • Performance optimization - Ensure dashboards load quickly

Alerting Strategy

  • Alert on symptoms, not causes - Focus on user impact
  • Reduce alert fatigue - Minimize false positives
  • Escalation procedures - Clear escalation paths
  • Runbook integration - Link alerts to troubleshooting guides

Prometheus + Grafana

  • Prometheus - Metrics collection and storage
  • Grafana - Visualization and dashboards
  • Alertmanager - Alert handling and routing
  • Exporters - Metrics collection from various sources

Cloud-Native Solutions

  • AWS CloudWatch - AWS native monitoring
  • Azure Monitor - Azure monitoring platform
  • Google Cloud Monitoring - GCP monitoring solution
  • Datadog - SaaS monitoring platform

ELK Stack

  • Elasticsearch - Search and analytics engine
  • Logstash - Data processing pipeline
  • Kibana - Visualization and exploration
  • Beats - Lightweight data shippers

TICK Stack

  • Telegraf - Data collection agent
  • InfluxDB - Time series database
  • Chronograf - Visualization and dashboards
  • Kapacitor - Real-time streaming data processing

Have any suggestions, additions, best-practices or references? Please contribute to help others learn!