Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) has revolutionized the management and provisioning of everything from local virtual machines to exotic AWS services. It is time for Monitoring-as-Code (MaC) to do the same in the application performance monitoring (APM) and synthetic monitoring fields — and the good news is that everyone stands to benefit.
Provisioning monitoring checks by hand is slow, too slow when the checks need to keep up with an application that is evolving quickly. This stays true no matter which monitoring service or platform you are using.
Another problem is with documentation. Who documents what the monitoring setup should look like, as a whole and in its parts? What is each check’s configuration? What about the alerting logic for when things catch on fire? It’s up to you to put that all down on paper to avoid the risks that come with having everything live in somebody’s head.
Possibly the worst and often unseen issue, though, is that manual monitoring workflows do not fit in the bigger picture. They do not tie into how software is being built, really. They lie by the wayside, hopefully getting enough of our attention to prevent costly outages while not diverting it too much from our real objective: shipping incredible applications.
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