Monitoring
Standing up the infrastructure is only half the job: you also need to see what's happening inside it. Without observability, performance problems, error spikes, and capacity limits only surface once your customers have already felt the impact.
That's why we set up a fully open source observability stack built on Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Promtail. It covers the two things that matter most day to day: metrics (what's happening right now) and logs (what happened and why), on both bare metal servers and AWS environments.
How we build the observability stack
Prometheus sits at the center of metrics collection: it periodically scrapes endpoints exposed by your applications and by the infrastructure itself (CPU, memory, disk, network), storing everything in a time-series database and letting you configure alerts based on rules.
For logs, we use the Promtail and Loki pair. Promtail runs alongside your applications and automatically ships logs to Loki, which indexes them in a lightweight, low-cost way, since it only indexes metadata instead of the full content of every line.
Finally, Grafana brings everything together in one place: dashboards with Prometheus metrics side by side with Loki logs, plus configurable alerts that notify your team before an issue turns into an incident.
Fine-tuning and cost under control
A poorly configured observability setup can become as big a cost source as the infrastructure it monitors. That's why we manage metric and log retention, scrape intervals, and alert rules to keep the stack lean and relevant, without noise.
The goal is for dashboards and alerts to actually be used day to day, with panels designed for each team and alerts that flag real problems, not distractions.
