We used to think of monitoring as just a way to know when things were broken. We had some basic dashboards and alerts, but we weren't really using our monitoring data to its full potential.
That all changed when we decided to invest in a more robust monitoring setup with Prometheus and Grafana. We started tracking everything we could think of, from server CPU usage to the number of API requests per second. And what we found surprised us.
More Than Just Alerts
It turned out that all of this data was useful for a lot more than just telling us when something was wrong. By looking at our monitoring data, we were able to:
- Find performance bottlenecks we didn't know we had: We found a few slow database queries that were a lot more of a problem than we realized.
- Make our systems more reliable: We were able to identify and fix a lot of small issues before they could turn into big outages.
- Get a better understanding of how our users use our product: We could see which features were the most popular and where people were running into trouble.
A New Way of Thinking
Investing in better monitoring has changed the way we think about building and running our software. We're no longer just reacting to problems—we're proactively looking for ways to make our systems better. It’s been a huge win for us, and it’s made our whole team more confident in the reliability of our product.