Implementing Observability and Monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, and New Relic

Introduction to Observability and Monitoring

You've scaled your cloud-native application to 10M requests/day. Suddenly, your DB connection pool is maxed out, and you're seeing errors everywhere. You need to understand what's happening in your application, and fast. That's where observability and monitoring come in.

The Problem We Faced

At our company, we were experiencing intermittent errors in our application, but we couldn't seem to pinpoint the cause. We tried logging, but the logs were overwhelming, and we couldn't make sense of them. That's when we decided to implement observability and monitoring using Prometheus, Grafana, and New Relic.

What is Observability and Monitoring?

Observability is the ability to measure the internal state of a system by observing its outputs. Monitoring is the process of collecting and analyzing data to identify issues and improve performance. In our case, we needed to monitor our application's performance, errors, and resource usage to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.

Implementing Prometheus

Prometheus is a popular monitoring system that provides a flexible and scalable way to collect metrics. We started by installing Prometheus on our Kubernetes cluster using the following configuration:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: prometheus-config
data:
  prometheus.