Monitoring and Alerts

Monitoring means watching your live application for problems. Error tracking tools like Sentry catch unhandled exceptions and show you the exact stack trace. Uptime monitors ping your endpoints and alert you when they go down. Performance monitoring tracks response times, database query durations, and memory usage.

Alerts turn monitoring data into action. You set thresholds ("alert me if error rate exceeds 1% or response time exceeds 2 seconds") and get notified via email, Slack, or PagerDuty. Good alerts are specific and actionable. Bad alerts fire constantly and get ignored.

For vibe coders, monitoring is the feedback loop after deployment. AI helps you build features fast, but monitoring tells you if those features are actually working in production. Setting up basic error tracking and uptime monitoring before launch saves you from learning about outages from your users.