With the growing complexity of infrastructures, exponentially driven by the adoption of microservices-oriented architectures, it has become critical to attain a global view of all the different components of an infrastructure. It is unthinkable to manually validate the health of each instance, caching service, database, or load balancer. There are way too many moving pieces to count—let alone keep a close eye on.

Nowadays, it is expected that monitoring will keep track of data from those components. However, data might come in several forms, allowing it to be used for different purposes.

Alerting is one of the standard uses of monitoring data, but the application of such data can go far beyond it. You may require historical information to assist you in capacity planning or incident investigations, or you may need a higher resolution to drill down into a problem and even higher freshness to decrease the mean time to recovery during an outage.

You can look at monitoring as a source of information for maintaining healthy systems, production- and business-wise.