Monitoring vs logs: what they solve and why one fails without the other
Monitoring and logs are often confused, but they answer different questions: monitoring shows what is happening, while logs help explain why it is 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 creates noise and confusion during an incident.
Good infrastructure design establishes a focused set of actionable metrics, alerts and logs that lead to a specific response.
If you are starting out, a small number of alerts that your team acts on is better than hundreds that everyone ignores.
Related:
Do you need help?
If you face similar challenges when designing monitoring and logging, get in touch with us – we can advise you on how to set it up correctly and sustainably.
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