Centralized Monitoring and Alerting
Scale monitoring beyond a single server: ship metrics and logs to a central system, build dashboards, and configure alerts so you learn about problems before your users do.
Why Centralize?
Logging into each server with top and journalctl works for one machine. With many servers it does not scale, and you only see problems when you happen to look.
Centralized monitoring collects metrics and logs from all servers into one place, with dashboards and automatic alerts.
Metrics vs Logs
Two kinds of data drive observability:
- Metrics — numeric time-series like CPU %, memory, request rate
- Logs — discrete text events like errors and access entries
You usually collect both, with different tools optimized for each.
All lessons in this course
- System Monitoring Tools
- Understanding System Logs
- Log Rotation and Archiving
- Centralized Monitoring and Alerting