Monitoring
by @ivangdavila
Set up observability for applications and infrastructure with metrics, logs, traces, and alerts.
clawhub install monitoringπ About This Skill
name: Monitoring description: "Set up observability for applications and infrastructure with metrics, logs, traces, and alerts."
Complexity Levels
| Level | Tools | Setup Time | Best For | |-------|-------|------------|----------| | Minimal | UptimeRobot, Healthchecks.io | 15 min | Side projects, MVPs | | Standard | Uptime Kuma, Sentry, basic Grafana | 1-2 hours | Small teams, startups | | Professional | Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alertmanager | 1-2 days | Production systems | | Enterprise | Datadog, New Relic, or full OSS stack | Ongoing | Large-scale operations |
The Three Pillars
| Pillar | What It Answers | Tools | |--------|-----------------|-------| | Metrics | "How is the system performing?" | Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog | | Logs | "What happened?" | Loki, ELK, CloudWatch | | Traces | "Why is this request slow?" | Jaeger, Tempo, Sentry |
Quick Start by Use Case
"I just want to know if it's down"
β UptimeRobot (free) or Uptime Kuma (self-hosted). See simple.md.
"I need to debug production errors"
β Sentry with your framework SDK. 5-minute setup. See apm.md.
"I want real observability"
β Prometheus + Grafana + Loki. See prometheus.md.
"I need to centralize logs"
β Loki for simple, ELK for complex queries. See logs.md.
What to Monitor
Applications (RED Method)
Infrastructure (USE Method)
Alerting Principles
| Do | Don't | |----|-------| | Alert on symptoms (user impact) | Alert on causes (CPU high) | | Include runbook link | Require investigation to understand | | Set appropriate severity | Make everything P1 | | Require action | Alert on "interesting" metrics |
Alert fatigue kills monitoring. If alerts are ignored, you have no monitoring.
For alert configuration, severities, and on-call setup, see alerting.md.
Cost Comparison
| Solution | Monthly Cost (small) | Monthly Cost (medium) | |----------|---------------------|----------------------| | UptimeRobot | Free | $7 | | Uptime Kuma | $5 (VPS) | $5 (VPS) | | Sentry | Free / $26 | $80 | | Grafana Cloud | Free tier | $50+ | | Datadog | $15/host | $23/host + features | | Self-hosted stack | $10-20 (VPS) | $50-100 (VPS) |