Monitoring & alerts: why every developer should care

Imagine your app goes down on a Saturday night… and the only reason you find out is because a customer tweets about it.

That’s what happens when you don’t have monitoring and alerts in place.

As developers, we often focus on writing and shipping code—but keeping software healthy after it’s live is just as important. Monitoring and alerting are the tools that help us do that.

🔍 What is monitoring?

Monitoring is the practice of collecting and analyzing data about your system in real time. This can include:

• CPU, memory, and disk usage
• Uptime/downtime
• Request rates
• API response times
• Error rates
• Logs and events

Monitoring helps you answer questions like:

• Is my app healthy?
• Are users experiencing errors?
• Is performance degrading?

It’s like having a dashboard for the heart rate of your app.

🚨 What are alerts?

Alerts are notifications triggered when something goes wrong (or is about to).

You set up rules or thresholds like:

• “Alert me if response time > 2s for more than 5 minutes”
• “Notify us if CPU usage goes above 90%”
• “Send an SMS if there are more than 10 errors per minute”

Alerts help you:

• React quickly to problems
• Catch issues before users do
• Prevent small bugs from turning into outages

🤝 Monitoring + alerts = observability in action

Monitoring shows you what’s happening.

Alerts tell you when to care.

Together, they make up the foundation of observability, a discipline that helps you understand how and why your software behaves a certain way in production.

📦 What can you monitor?

Every layer of your stack can (and should) be observed.

💡 Real-world scenarios

• Your payment API suddenly returns 500 errors → alert triggers → team gets notified in Slack
• A memory leak causes crashes every 12 hours → logs + monitoring show a pattern
• User reports “the site is slow” → you check metrics and see high response times after a recent deploy

Without monitoring, you'd be flying blind.

With it, you can spot, diagnose, and fix issues faster.

🛠 Common tools you can use

✅ Metrics & dashboards

• Prometheus + Grafana
• Datadog
• New Relic
• AWS CloudWatch

✅ Logs

• Elastic Stack (ELK)
• Logtail / Loggly
• Papertrail

✅ Alerts & notifications

• PagerDuty
• Opsgenie
• Slack / Email / SMS integrations

Many platforms like Vercel, Firebase, or Render also offer built-in basic monitoring.

⚠️ What happens without monitoring?

• You discover issues too late
• Debugging takes longer (you have no data)
• Customers lose trust when downtime goes unnoticed
• Teams get reactive instead of proactive

Monitoring isn’t just for huge companies, it’s for any project that matters.

✅ Summary

• Monitoring tracks system health and performance
• Alerts notify you when something breaks or slows down
• Together, they help you catch bugs, diagnose issues, and protect your users
• You can start small with simple tools and grow over time

🧠 Conclusion

Shipping code is just one part of the job. Making sure that code stays healthy in production? That’s where monitoring and alerts come in.

Whether you're working on a solo project, a startup, or a large-scale app, observability gives you the power to respond fast, sleep better, and build reliable software your users can trust.

Don’t wait for something to break, monitor it.