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Platform Health Monitoring & Observability

What is it?

Platform Health Monitoring refers to the continuous tracking of the performance, availability, and overall health of the systems and infrastructure that make up your platform. This involves collecting and analyzing metrics like CPU usage, memory consumption, disk I/O, network latency, and error rates, among others.

Observability goes beyond basic monitoring by providing insights into the internal state of a system based on the data (logs, metrics, and traces) it produces. Observability allows teams to not only detect issues but to understand why they are happening and how to resolve them. Developers use observability tools to understand things like which line of code caused an error, which user submitted a form, and what data is being stored into databases.

In essence:

  • Monitoring tells you when something goes wrong.
  • Observability helps you understand why it went wrong and how to fix it.

Example:

Monitoring tells you that error rates are high on one of your servers. Using observability tools, developers look into the logs to determine that the application is not able to communicate with the database when storing new user account credentials.

Why is it Important?

Platform Health Monitoring & Observability are essential for ensuring the reliability, performance, and user satisfaction of your platform. Here’s why it’s critical:

  • Proactive Issue Detection: Monitoring allows teams to identify issues before they escalate into critical problems. This helps in minimizing downtime and ensuring high availability.
  • Faster Incident Resolution: Observability provides the necessary context to quickly diagnose and resolve incidents. This reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) and improves overall platform stability.
  • Continuous Improvement: By analyzing trends and patterns in your platform's performance, you can make informed decisions about optimizations and future improvements.
  • Accountability & Transparency: Having a clear understanding of your platform’s health promotes accountability among engineering teams and builds confidence among stakeholders that the platform is reliable and well-maintained.