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.

This data includes, but is not limited to, information that answers questions such as: What action was performed? By whom? When? And what resources were affected by that action?

Is Monitoring Required Only for Cloud-Based Applications?

You’ve guessed it: the answer is no. Monitoring is important whether your application is deployed on premises or in the cloud, although organizations may give special care to monitoring cloud-based applications as they are running outside their datacenters.

That being said, cloud providers offer you a wide range of tools, such as application performance management (APM) tools, that make putting together a monitoring solution and alerting mechanisms easier than doing it all by yourself.

What Should We Monitor?

Monitoring is a driving factor that will ensure that your application is successful in the long run. You’ll rely on monitoring as an indicator to figure out whether your application is still meeting users’ demands in terms of the following:

Functionality

Are there features that are no longer used or that are confusing users?

User experience

Is your application responding fast enough? Are users experiencing issues?

Usage patterns

How are your customers using your application?

Security

Is the application under attack? Was the application hacked? Was there any data exfiltration?

Billing

Is your application costing you more than expected? Can you reduce your service plan?

Platform’s health status

Are there any service failures on the cloud platform?

And almost any other kinds of insights you may think of.

Monitoring and Dashboarding

Your cloud provider of choice is likely to provide you with a way to build dashboards in its console. This is a great way to set up a visualization of what’s going on with your software system (application and infrastructure) by pinning metrics and telemetry data.

We Should Design Our Applications for Monitoring from the Start

To be effective, monitoring can’t be considered just at the end of the application’s design process. It has to be considered from the beginning of the design journey. You have to think about what telemetry data you want to monitor, at which stage and in what form? Where will you send that telemetry data? Will you need to query the telemetry data in real time? Do you need to be alerted if something unusual or potentially dangerous is detected? At what frequency? These are just some of the questions you’ll need to answer.

By now, you probably have a better view into what monitoring can bring to you and your applications. So, the next time you work on a cloud-based application (or an on-premises one, for that matter), make sure you infuse monitoring into it.