Logging and monitoring are not advanced topics. However, they are things that you do not realize just how important they are until you do not have them. Useful data about your service is essential to understanding the load and environment that your service is operating in so that you can make sure that it is finely tuned to give the very best performance.
Consider this example: when you first launch your service, you have an endpoint that returns a list of kittens. Initially, this service is responding promptly with a 20 ms response time; however, as people start to add items to the service, the speed slows to 200 ms. The first part of this problem is that you need to know about this slowdown. If you work in e-commerce, there is a direct correlation between the time it takes to process a request or a page to load and the likelihood that your customers will...