Observability & Production Monitoring

Observability & Production Monitoring

Without visibility into a running system, every production issue is a guessing game. Log levels (fatal, error, warn, info, debug, trace) and knowing what actually belongs in a log line are the starting point; from there, structured logging (ELK/Loki), metrics and dashboards (Prometheus + Grafana), alerting rules, and a first introduction to distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry) close the feedback loop between a deploy and the quality it actually delivers.

Starting Points

• Apache Log4j. Custom Log Levels.
• Pearson (2026). Reliability Engineering in the Cloud. LinkedIn Learning
• Schmidt, K., Phillips, C., & Chuvakin, A. (2012). Logging and Log Management. O'Reilly.

Key Points

• You explain the difference between the log levels.
• You explain which level is needed in which situation.
• You know how to find syslog on Unix/Linux and the Event Log on Windows.
• You're aware that tools keep their own log files.
• You know what belongs in a log message, and what a stack trace is.