Week 3: Monitoring & Logging with Prometheus and ELK Stack

This week in our Dev-Talk Tuesday series on DevOps, we’re focusing on Monitoring & Logging.

Once your code is deployed and your infrastructure is live, the next step of the process is making sure everything keeps running as it should. Monitoring and logging help your team catch problems early, keep systems running smoothly, and avoid unnecessary downtime.

Why Monitoring & Logging Matter

Monitoring and logging are critical for maintaining reliable and scalable applications:

• Monitoring gives you real-time visibility into your systems and applications, so you can detect issues early.
• Logging provides a historical record of events that helps you troubleshoot problems, analyze trends, and meet compliance requirements.

Let’s explore two tools that stand out in DevOps:

Prometheus: Real-Time Monitoring and Alerting

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system that collects metrics from configured targets at defined intervals and stores them in a time-series database.

Key Features:

• Multi-dimensional data model with time series identified by metric name and key/value pairs
• Powerful query language (PromQL) for analyzing data
• Built-in alerting capabilities
• Easy integration with visualization tools like Grafana

With Prometheus, you can monitor resource usage, application performance, and even custom business metrics—all while setting up alerts for potential issues before they become critical.

ELK Stack: Centralized Logging

The ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) is a robust log management solution that helps teams store, process, and visualize log data from multiple sources.

• Elasticsearch stores and indexes logs for fast querying.
• Logstash ingests, transforms, and forwards logs.
• Kibana lets you explore, visualize, and build dashboards for your log data.

This combination gives teams the power to:

• Search and filter logs in real-time
• Identify and investigate errors or anomalies
• Create dashboards to visualize patterns and system health

Why Use Both?

Pairing Prometheus and the ELK Stack gives you full visibility over your infrastructure and applications:

• Prometheus shines in real-time metric collection and alerting.
• ELK excels at log aggregation, storage, and deep-dive troubleshooting.

Together, they create a feedback loop that empowers your DevOps team to act quickly and confidently.

Best Practices for Monitoring & Logging

• Define clear monitoring goals and log retention policies
• Use structured logging for easier parsing and analysis
• Set actionable alert thresholds to reduce noise
• Automate log rotation and archival
• Continuously review metrics and logs for optimization opportunities

Monitoring and logging help keep operations running smoothly. Tools like Prometheus and ELK Stack give your team the insights they need to maintain system health, resolve issues faster, and improve over time.

Next week, we’ll wrap up our DevOps series by exploring DevOps in Cloud Environments (AWS, Azure, GCP). Stay tuned!

How are you managing your monitoring and logs today? We’d love to hear what tools and strategies work for your team!