Microservices monitoring is a process that tracks the health, performance, availability, dependencies, logs, metrics, traces, containers and deployments of individual services and the entire application.
With Microservices architecture becoming the de facto standard for web applications now, effective debugging and anomaly detection calls for a system that is observable , which means, the internal state of an application can be inferred by observing and tracking the metrics, traces and logs.
Microservices Monitoring vs. Observability: What’s the Difference?
Microservices monitoring focuses on tracking predefined signals such as CPU and memory usage, request rates, error rates, latency, container health and service availability. Observability goes a step further by helping engineering teams understand why a system is behaving a certain way using telemetry such as metrics, logs and distributed traces.
For a production microservices environment, both are important. Monitoring can alert teams that a service is unhealthy, while observability helps them investigate the underlying cause across services, containers, infrastructure, and deployments.
A practical microservices observability strategy typically combines:
- Metrics to measure service and infrastructure performance
- Logs to investigate application and system events
- Traces to follow requests across distributed services
- Deployment data to identify whether a recent release introduced an issue
- Container and pod health to understand runtime conditions
- Alerts and dashboards to help teams detect and respond to problems quickly
SigNoz
SigNoz is a full-stack open-source APM(Application Performance Management) and observability tool. It has the ability to capture metrics, traces and logs. The ultimate goal is to use collected data to gain insights for ensuring compliance and security of applications and infrastructure. This microservices monitoring tool can easily be hosted within any infrastructure.
SigNoz enables a full-stack observability stack for monitoring microservices applications and helps engineering teams to gain comprehensive observability through,
- Generation of telemetry data(logs, metrics & traces)
- A storage backend to store the telemetry data, which is quite large
- A visualization layer for the DevOps teams to consume and take action on
A unique feature about SigNoz is the fact that it uses OpenTelemetry, which is a vendor-agnostic instrumentation library for generating telemetry data.
SigNoz Dashboard with visualization of RED metrics (Number of requests, rate of error & duration)
BuildPiper
BuildPiper is an enterprise application delivery platform designed to help engineering teams standardise and manage software delivery across modern application environments. It brings CI/CD, deployment automation, security, governance, and observability capabilities into a unified delivery workflow.
For microservices teams, BuildPiper provides visibility into the deployment lifecycle and Kubernetes runtime state. Teams can review deployment status, container and pod conditions, replica availability, deployment logs, YAML configurations, and deployment activity to investigate issues during or after a release.
Key capabilities relevant to microservices delivery include:
- Deployment visibility: Track the status and progress of service deployments.
- Pod and container visibility: Review pod conditions, container status, events, and health information.
- Replica monitoring: Check desired, ready, available, and unavailable replicas.
- Deployment logs: Review deployment activity and logs when troubleshooting release issues.
- Deployment history: See previous deployment status, duration, trigger information, artifacts, and parameters.
- Deployment strategies: Support for approaches such as rolling, blue-green, and canary deployments.
- Rollout validation: Validate deployments as part of the release process.
- CI/CD orchestration: Standardise build and deployment workflows across services and teams.
When Microservices Monitoring Isn’t Enough: Connecting Observability With Deployment
Monitoring can tell an engineering team that a microservice is unhealthy, but identifying what changed and whether a deployment caused the problem can require information from several different systems. This becomes particularly challenging in enterprise Kubernetes environments where teams manage hundreds of services, multiple environments, frequent releases, and complex deployment workflows.
This is where an application delivery platform such as BuildPiper can complement traditional observability tools. Instead of replacing specialised monitoring platforms for metrics, logs, and traces, BuildPiper provides visibility into the delivery and deployment side of the application lifecycle, including deployment status, pod and container health, deployment logs, rollout activity, and deployment history. Teams can use this information alongside their existing observability stack to understand not only that a service is experiencing an issue, but also what was deployed, where it was deployed, and what happened during the deployment.
For platform engineering, DevOps, and SRE teams managing microservices at enterprise scale, connecting deployment intelligence with application observability can make troubleshooting faster and help create a more controlled and repeatable release process.
Instana
Instana is an automated application monitoring and observability tool. It provides businesses with comprehensive observability to manage and analyze the performance of complex applications and software no matter where they are in — public, private, on-premises.
Instana uses an agent for discovering and monitoring the components. It is installed on every host that is to be monitored. Sensors designed to collect data from different technologies are deployed through these agents. Sensors automatically collect configuration, changes, metrics, and events using which DevOps teams can analyze the complete performance of the applications.
Dynatrace
Dyntrace is an extensive SaaS enterprise tool that looks after the monitoring needs of large-scale enterprises. It provides an AI engine known as Davis which helps to automate the process of root cause analysis and anomaly detection.
Right from infrastructure monitoring to application security, Dyntrace leverages unified AIOps for handling cloud operations, automating DevSecOps, and integrating with all major cloud platforms and technologies.
Teams can easily manage all DevOps operations with this platform that can work seamlessly across Microservices apps and help in monitoring Microservices applications for driving better results.
Grafana
Grafana is popular open-source analytics and interactive visualization web layer that provides charts, graphs and alerts for the web on being supported by compatible data sources. It also supports many different storage backends for time-series data.
It allows DevOps teams to query, visualize, analyze and understand metrics no matter where they are stored. With Grafana, enterprises can create, explore, and share dashboards with teams to view and measure app performance.
Grafana provides plugins, dashboards, alerts, and different user-level access for monitoring Microservices applications and for gauging their health status.
Here is how to monitor Microservices using Grafana. It renders two versions of services that include,
- Grafana cloud — Users can send data to Grafana cloud dashboards. Grafana Cloud Logs, Grafana Cloud Metrics, and Grafana Cloud Traces are some of the solutions offered by Google cloud.
- Grafana Enterprise stack — It provides support for metrics and logs with Grafana installed withiMicroservices Monitoring Tools: Which One Fits Your Needs?n the infrastructure.
Microservices Monitoring Tools: Which One Fits Your Needs?
| Tool | Primary focus | Best suited for |
|---|---|---|
| SigNoz | Open-source observability | Metrics, logs and traces |
| Instana | APM and automated observability | Enterprise application monitoring |
| Dynatrace | Full-stack observability and AIOps | Large enterprise environments |
| Grafana | Visualization and observability | Dashboards, metrics and alerts |
| BuildPiper | Application delivery and deployment visibility | Microservices delivery, Kubernetes deployments, CI/CD and operational visibility |
Observability tools tell teams what is happening. BuildPiper helps teams understand and control what is happening around the application delivery and deployment lifecycle.
A Final Note: Observe and Resolve!
Applications in production may fail for various reasons. No matter how safe the application has been built, there can always be a scope for error. If SRE teams fail in gaining clear and comprehensive visibility of the app, they can have a hard time finding and debugging the production issues.
Thus, it’s crucial that DevOps & SRE should learn and know how to monitor Microservices. Besides this, they need to continuously examine the gathered data to find solutions for problems within the app. Enterprises must invest and try exploring these Microservices monitoring tools to get complete observability of their business applications and to keep a check on its health status and performance.
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