Monitoring is a key point of any microservice architecture and, in particular, for any cloud-based architecture. No matter what, your architecture needs to have a monitoring platform so that it can constantly observe the performance of the system, its reliability, its resource availability and consumption, its security and storage, and so on.

However, choosing the correct platform can be difficult, because there are a lot of components that come into play. The tasks that are used to properly implement a monitoring solution platform are as follows:

• Use one platform: A platform that's capable of discovering and grasping information of the running systems, and aggregate the result in a comprehensive way using charts.
• Identify metrics and events: An application is responsible for exposing these metrics, and the platform should take only the ones that are the most relevant.
•  Split data: Store application-monitoring data separately from infrastructure-monitoring data, but centralize the monitoring view.
• Alert: Provide alerts when limits are met, both for application and infrastructure. For example; when an application is performing slowly, and when the storage is running out of space.
• Observe user experience: Response times, throughput, latency, and errors.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Prometheus
• Node-exporter
• Grafana