97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know

Chapter 54. Monitor, You Will

Tidjani Belmansour

Cloud Solutions Architect at Cofomo

So, you have built a shiny new application that you plan to deploy to the cloud. You have applied all the best design patterns and practices to create a resilient and scalable architecture. You have tested your application using various methods and approaches in order to ensure that it meets users’ demands and that it is bug-free—or, at least, free of “severity 1” types of bugs (you may have kept track of less-critical bugs in a “technical debt” registry of some sort). You probably also have scripted your infrastructure and created the required CI/CD pipelines. You’ve just deployed your application into the production environment, and you’re ready to celebrate your success.

Well, not so fast. Haven’t you forgotten something? What about monitoring?

What Is Monitoring and Why Should We Care?

No matter where you look up the word monitoring, you’ll end up with a definition that is close to this one:

Monitoring is the systematic and periodic process of collecting, analyzing, and using information to track the usage, quality, or progress of an asset toward reaching its objectives.

Monitoring requires data. It is the data that is gathered. It can be in multiple forms and come from various sources (activity logs, server logs, application logs, and so on). This is usually referred to as telemetry data ...