Even a medium-sized website can be extremely complex. Django might be one of the hundreds of applications and services running and interacting with each other. In the same way that the heart beat and other vital signs can be constantly monitored to assess the health of the human body, so are various metrics collected, analyzed, and presented in most production systems.

While logging keeps track of various events, such as arrival of a web request or an exception, monitoring usually refers to collecting key information periodically, such as memory utilization or network latency. However, differences get blurred at application level, such as, while monitoring database query performance, which might very well be collected from logs.

Monitoring also helps with the early detection of problems. Unusual patterns, such as spikes or a gradually increasing load, can be signs of bigger underlying problems, such as a memory leak. A good monitoring system can alert site owners of problems before...