Observability and Monitoring with Modern Tools

One of the biggest challenges with APIs is that we rarely receive actual feedback on what is happening in our service. We strive to design our services in a way that our HTTP responses clearly indicate the success or failure of each operation, but this is not always sufficient. The most concerning types of responses are those in the 5xx range, which provide no useful information.

As microservice architectures become more complex, understanding the internal workings of the system becomes a crucial part of maintaining healthy applications. Earlier in this book, we discussed how communication patterns, resilience mechanisms, and orchestration strategies help microservices withstand inevitable failures. However, even the most resilient system is vulnerable if developers and operators lack visibility into its inner processes. This is why observability is essential.

Monitoring is essential but only indicates when issues arise. Observability...