Monitoring Microservices: A Complete Guide

Monoliths are easy to monitor: it's either up or it's down. Microservices are a different beast. Service A might be up, but it can't talk to Service B, which is causing high latency in Service C.

Synthetic vs. Real User Monitoring (RUM)

For microservices, you need both. RUM tells you what users are experiencing. Synthetic monitoring (what Pulsx does) tells you if the lights are on, even when users aren't active.

Key Metrics to Watch

• Latency (P95/P99): Average latency lies. Look at the tail.
• Error Rate: A 1% error rate in a critical service is an outage.
• Saturation: How full are your queues and thread pools?

Distributed Tracing

When a request fails, you need to know where. While Pulsx monitors the endpoints, we recommend pairing it with an internal tracing tool like Jaeger or Honeycomb for deep code-level visibility.