Understanding logging and monitoring

Switching to a more grounded topic, one of the driving principles of DevOps is logging and monitoring instances, endpoints, services, and whatever else you can track and trace. This is necessary because regardless of whatever you do, how clean your code is, or how good your server configuration is, something will fail, go wrong, or just inexplicably stop working altogether. This will happen. It’s a fact of life. It is in fact, Murphy’s law:

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong at the worst possible time.

Familiarizing yourself with this truth is important for a DevOps engineer. Once you have acknowledged it, then you can deal with it. Logging and monitoring come in because when something does go wrong, you need the appropriate data to respond to that event, sometimes automatically.

The rest of this section has been laid out in terms of logging, monitoring, and alerts. Each one of these aspects plays an important role in...