Monitoring and Observability: Know Your Application Inside Out

The three pillars of observability — Metrics, Logs, and Traces — give complete visibility into your app's health. Companies with mature observability resolve incidents 69% faster (Splunk, 2024).

Metrics with Prometheus

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: "laravel"
    scrape_interval: 15s
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["app:9090"]
  - job_name: "mysql"
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["mysql-exporter:9104"]

Key Metrics to Track

Application:
  - Request rate (requests/second)
  - Error rate (5xx responses / total)
  - Response time (p50, p95, p99)
  - Queue depth and processing time

Infrastructure:
  - CPU and memory usage per container
  - Disk I/O and space
  - Network throughput

Structured Logging in Laravel

// JSON format for log aggregation
'channels' => [
    'structured' => [
        'driver' => 'single',
        'path' => storage_path('logs/app.json'),
        'formatter' => Monolog\Formatter\JsonFormatter::class,
    ],
],

Log::channel('structured')->info('Order placed', [
    'order_id' => $order->id,
    'user_id' => $user->id,
    'total' => $order->total,
    'duration_ms' => $elapsed,
]);

Grafana Dashboards

• RED Method — Rate, Errors, Duration for services
• USE Method — Utilization, Saturation, Errors for resources

Alerting Rules

groups:
  - name: app_alerts
    rules:
      - alert: HighErrorRate
        expr: rate(http_errors_total[5m]) / rate(http_requests_total[5m]) > 0.05
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: critical
        annotations:
          summary: "Error rate above 5%"

Observability turns "our site is down" into "we detected and fixed the issue before users noticed."