Monitoring vs logs: what they solve and why one fails without the other
Monitoring and logs are often confused. In the comparison below, they answer different questions: monitoring = what's going on, logos = why is this happening.
Key questions
- What is a critical service for us and what is just a "nice-to-have"?
- Who responds to the alert and what is the expected response time?
- What is an incident and what is just information?
- Do we have a runbook or at least a basic triage procedure?
- Can we quickly prove the cause from the logs (and not just see the symptom)?
The most common mistake is to have "a lot of data" without context. This generates noise and panic at the incident.
A good infrastructure design establishes a minimum set of metrics, alerts and logs, which are actionable – lead to a specific action.
If you are starting out, it is better to have few alerts that you really deal with, than the hundreds you ignore.
Related:
Do you need help?
If you solve similar challenges when designing monitoring and logos, get in touch with us – we will advise you how to set it up correctly and sustainably.
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