How to Set Up Application Monitoring
Configure comprehensive monitoring with error tracking, performance metrics, and alerting.
What You'll Learn
This intermediate-level guide walks you through how to set up application monitoring step by step. Estimated time: 10 min.
Step 1: Set up error tracking
Integrate Sentry or similar for automatic error capture with stack traces and user context.
Step 2: Add performance monitoring
Track response times, database query performance, and Core Web Vitals for frontend.
Step 3: Configure alerting
Set up alerts for error rate spikes, latency increases, and availability drops via Slack or email.
Step 4: Build dashboards
Create operational dashboards showing system health, key metrics, and recent deployments.
Step 5: Implement logging
Add structured logging with correlation IDs for tracing requests across your system.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should I monitor first?▾
Start with error tracking (Sentry), uptime monitoring (Better Uptime), and basic performance metrics. Add more as your application grows.
How do I reduce alert fatigue?▾
Set meaningful thresholds based on historical data, group related alerts, and use AI-powered anomaly detection instead of static thresholds.
Free or paid monitoring tools?▾
Start with free tiers of Sentry, Vercel Analytics, and Better Uptime. Upgrade to Datadog or New Relic when you need deeper observability.