How to Set Up Monitoring and Alerting
Configure comprehensive infrastructure monitoring with metrics dashboards, log analysis, and intelligent alerting.
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What You'll Learn
This intermediate-level guide walks you through how to set up monitoring and alerting step by step. Estimated time: 14 min.
Step 1: Choose your monitoring stack
Select Datadog for all-in-one, Prometheus plus Grafana for open source, or cloud-native tools like CloudWatch for AWS.
Step 2: Instrument your services
Add metrics collection for CPU, memory, disk, network, application latency, error rates, and business metrics.
Step 3: Build monitoring dashboards
Create dashboards for infrastructure overview, per-service health, deployment tracking, and business KPIs.
Step 4: Configure alerting rules
Set up alerts with appropriate thresholds, routing policies, and escalation chains to notify the right people.
Step 5: Implement on-call rotation
Set up PagerDuty or Opsgenie for on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and incident management workflows.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should I alert on?▾
Alert on symptoms not causes — high error rates, latency spikes, and availability drops. Avoid alerting on individual server metrics that auto-heal.
How do I prevent alert fatigue?▾
Set meaningful thresholds based on SLOs, group related alerts, implement auto-resolution for transient issues, and review alert noise weekly.
Datadog or Prometheus plus Grafana?▾
Datadog for teams wanting managed simplicity with unified metrics, logs, and traces. Prometheus plus Grafana for cost control and open-source flexibility.