Application monitoring is essential for every production software system. In this article, we get to know Prometheus and Grafana and learn how to use them to monitor Node.js applications.

What is application monitoring and why is it necessary?

Application monitoring is a method that uses software tools to gain insights into your software deployments. This can be achieved by simple health checks to see if the server is available to more advanced setups where a monitoring library is integrated into your server that sends data to a dedicated monitoring service. It can even involve the client side of your application, offering more detailed insights into the user experience.

For every developer, monitoring should be a crucial part of the daily work, because you need to know how the software behaves in production. You can let your testers work with your system and try to mock interactions or high loads, but these techniques will never be the same as the real production workload.

What is Prometheus and how does it work?

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system which was created in 2012 by Soundcloud. In 2016, Prometheus became the second project (following Kubernetes) to be hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

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