Monitoring remains a critical part of managing any IT system, while the challenges associated with monitoring microservices are especially unique. An example is how traditional monolithic systems, deployed as a single executable or library, have different points of failure and dependencies than those deployed with a microservices architecture.

It’s important to understand monitoring in general and how it is different for microservices applications. Microservices-based applications have different, and more intensive, monitoring requirements. The business logic applied to a process, such as a loan application, for example, is distributed between many separate services. In this way, tracking an application through the process requires correlating data from all these different services.

Some essential concepts relating to the hows and whys of microservices include:

• Why should systems be monitored?

• How is monitoring microservices different from monitoring monolithic applications?

• What data should be gathered when monitoring?

• What tools are available for publishing, gathering and storing monitoring data?

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