Monitoring & Observability

Monitoring helps you track applications, infrastructure, and services for health, performance, and reliability.

Monitoring vs. Observability

• Monitoring: Tracking metrics (CPU, memory, errors) and alerting for issues
• Observability: Understanding the internal state of systems by examining logs, metrics, and traces

Why Is Monitoring Important?

• Detect issues early
• Ensure high availability and performance
• Provide insights for capacity planning and optimization

Common Tools

• Prometheus: Metric collection and alerting
• Grafana: Visualization dashboards
• ELK/EFK Stack: Log aggregation (Elasticsearch, Logstash/Fluentd, Kibana)
• Datadog, New Relic, Splunk: Commercial solutions

Core Practices

• Set up baseline monitoring for all services
• Use dashboards and alerts for critical events
• Practice incident response and postmortems

A robust monitoring and observability setup helps teams respond quickly and deliver high-quality software!

Quick Recap

1. What is the primary goal of DevOps?

To write more codeTo reduce testing timeTo align development and operations teams for faster and more reliable deliveryTo eliminate the need for deployment tools

2. Which of the following is NOT a key pillar of DevOps?

CollaborationAutomationContinuous Integration and DeliveryManual Deployments

3. What does Continuous Integration (CI) primarily aim to solve?

Speed up container orchestrationReduce integration issues by merging code frequently and testing automaticallyManage logs and metricsEnable real-time communication between teams

4. What distinguishes Continuous Deployment from Continuous Delivery?

There is no differenceDeployment is manual in Continuous DeploymentDelivery deploys automatically, Deployment requires approvalDeployment pushes to production automatically without human intervention

5. Which of these tools is most closely associated with managing containerized applications at scale?

DockerGitHub ActionsKubernetesGrafana

6. Why are containers considered essential in modern DevOps workflows?

They increase code readabilityThey provide consistent environments across development and productionThey reduce code complexityThey replace the need for CI/CD pipelines

7. What is the key difference between Monitoring and Observability?

Monitoring only applies to hardwareObservability is about collecting logs, metrics, and traces to understand internal stateMonitoring requires no toolsThere is no difference

8. Which stack is commonly used for log aggregation and visualization?

CI/CD StackDocker ComposeELK/EFK StackLAMP Stack

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Congratulations! You’ve completed the DevOps basics path. Explore more advanced topics as you continue your journey.