Hi,

Here’s the translation of the text into English:

For years, my holy trinity in monitoring has been:

• Grafana for metrics
• Elastic for logs and tracing
• And Sentry for error tracking

With this stack, I have been moving from project to project for years. For some reason, I always ended up in projects that used this stack.

Maybe Loki was used instead of Elastic sometimes (ugh - I don’t like Loki 😉) .

Or Sentry wasn’t used (yet) and there were filters and dashboards in Kibana.

In my bubble of the last 10 years, this was the standard for some reason.

I got along with it well. The tools were easy to use.

But now I’m evaluating monitoring tools for a client

And I’m approaching the question with an open mind. There are tons of tools out there. Just the CNCF Landscape is overwhelming. And that’s not a complete list.

In mid-2023, Gartner published the “Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability” . There are a few more tools here.

It would be crazy to evaluate all the tools

So how do I come to a conclusion in this jungle? I don’t want to spend months in the evaluation.

And by what criteria do I evaluate the tools? Each tool has different features. And different prices.

There are a few hard requirements. The provider must be GDPR-compliant. It shouldn’t be an absolute newcomer.

But otherwise, it’s difficult to establish objective criteria.

Or even more specifically: I believe it’s harmful to set concrete criteria.

What purpose does your monitoring serve?

Actually, an obvious question. You want to identify and debug issues. And who does that?

A person.

A developer.

So what the tool primarily needs to fulfill: It must be liked by the developers.

And this is what I focus my evaluation on. Of course, the basic features must be met – but today, all the tools from the Magic Quadrant do that.

What’s much more important is that the developers like using the tool. Because only if they use it, does it fulfill its purpose.

This also explains why I don’t like Loki. I never got along with the query syntax 😬

What monitoring tool do you swear by? I’m looking forward to input for the evaluation!

Rule the Backend,

~ Marcus