In practice
The practical test is whether you find out about a failure before your customer does. That needs alerts on the things that matter to the business — a queue that stopped moving, a nightly job that did not run, an integration that returned errors all morning — rather than only on servers being up.
Where it fits in a build
Any system people depend on. It is the cheapest insurance in software and the first thing cut under deadline pressure, which is why so many outages are discovered by email.
Common mistakes
- Alerting on everything, so alerts are ignored.
- Logging without correlation identifiers, so a single case cannot be followed across systems.
- Monitoring uptime but not correctness — the system is running and has been producing wrong results since Tuesday.
Related terms
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