Production-Ready Microservices

Chapter 6. Monitoring

A production-ready microservice is one that is properly monitored. Proper monitoring is one of the most important parts of building a production-ready microservice and guarantees higher microservice availability. In this chapter, the essential components of microservice monitoring are covered, including which key metrics to monitor, how to log key metrics, building dashboards that display key metrics, how to approach alerting, and on-call best practices.

Principles of Microservice Monitoring

The majority of outages in a microservice ecosystem are caused by bad deployments. The second most common cause of outages is the lack of proper monitoring. It’s easy to see why this is the case. If the state of a microservice is unknown, if key metrics aren’t tracked, then any precipitating failures will remain unknown until an actual outage occurs. By the time a microservice experiences an outage due to lack of monitoring, its availability has already been compromised. During these outages, the time to mitigation and time to repair are prolonged, pulling the availability of the microservice down even further: without easily accessible information about the microservice’s key metrics, developers are often faced with a blank slate, unprepared to quickly resolve the issue. This is why proper monitoring is essential: it provides the development team with all of the relevant information about the microservice. When a microservice is properly monitored, its state is never ...