The Quiet Hero of the Backend: Why Monitoring and Logging Are the Foundation of Business Application Stability
Article date
09 26 2025
Article Author
Shabelnikov Ilya
Reading Time
5 minutes
Behind the Scenes of the Digital Circus: The Unsung Geniuses Who Keep It All Together
You click the "pay" button in an online store. You see a neat screen with a loading bar. Somewhere in the depths of a data centre, a titanic battle is taking place. Data is moving at the speed of light, security systems are checking it, and money is transferring from one account to another. It's a true magic. But it works until it doesn't. And then the user sees only the same, painfully familiar phrase: "Oops... Something went wrong." Or, even worse, a loading circle that spins, spins, spins...
This is where the moment of truth comes. The reputation you've been building for months, the customers' money - it's all hanging by a thread. And the question is: how quickly will your developers figure out where this invisible thread has broken?
The answer, as is often the case, lies not in shiny interfaces, but in two seemingly boring things. Monitoring and logging. It's like the writers and sound designers in a big movie - their work is invisible, but without them, the movie falls apart. They are the quiet, unrecognised heroes.
You click the "pay" button in an online store. You see a neat screen with a loading bar. Somewhere in the depths of a data centre, a titanic battle is taking place. Data is moving at the speed of light, security systems are checking it, and money is transferring from one account to another. It's a true magic. But it works until it doesn't. And then the user sees only the same, painfully familiar phrase: "Oops... Something went wrong." Or, even worse, a loading circle that spins, spins, spins...
This is where the moment of truth comes. The reputation you've been building for months, the customers' money - it's all hanging by a thread. And the question is: how quickly will your developers figure out where this invisible thread has broken?
The answer, as is often the case, lies not in shiny interfaces, but in two seemingly boring things. Monitoring and logging. It's like the writers and sound designers in a big movie - their work is invisible, but without them, the movie falls apart. They are the quiet, unrecognised heroes.
What is really behind the "500" error? One story from life.
Imagine a typical day. A wave of traffic hits the website - let's say, a sale. And now the first angry messages pop up in the support chat. "It's not working!"
And now there are two scenarios. The good old and... the terrible.
Scenario one: The Dark Ages. You're the last to know about the problem. From the customers. The developers rush to their computers with panicked eyes. It's like trying to fix an engine in complete darkness, by feel. "The database? The memory? Did someone break something in the last commit?" The questions pour in. It takes hours just to find the source of the problem. Hours of downtime. Hours of lost money and ruined nerves.
Scenario two: Insight. This is how it looks like now. The monitoring system was quietly hinting at growing stress even before the peak load. And at the moment of failure, a clear signal immediately lights up: "Server #3: memory is running out." Not "something broke," but a specific diagnosis. The rest is just a matter of technique. We open the logs, set a filter by time and this very server. And literally in a few seconds we find the very line of code that behaved inappropriately and filled up all the memory. We fix the problem before the bulk of users even had time to sneeze.
The difference? Colossal: like between trying to find a way in the forest by the stars with the help of an oil lamp and using a GPS navigator with live satellite images.
And now there are two scenarios. The good old and... the terrible.
Scenario one: The Dark Ages. You're the last to know about the problem. From the customers. The developers rush to their computers with panicked eyes. It's like trying to fix an engine in complete darkness, by feel. "The database? The memory? Did someone break something in the last commit?" The questions pour in. It takes hours just to find the source of the problem. Hours of downtime. Hours of lost money and ruined nerves.
Scenario two: Insight. This is how it looks like now. The monitoring system was quietly hinting at growing stress even before the peak load. And at the moment of failure, a clear signal immediately lights up: "Server #3: memory is running out." Not "something broke," but a specific diagnosis. The rest is just a matter of technique. We open the logs, set a filter by time and this very server. And literally in a few seconds we find the very line of code that behaved inappropriately and filled up all the memory. We fix the problem before the bulk of users even had time to sneeze.
The difference? Colossal: like between trying to find a way in the forest by the stars with the help of an oil lamp and using a GPS navigator with live satellite images.
Logs: the diary of your application
If our app were to keep a diary, it would be in the form of logs. A detailed, meticulous, and sometimes a bit boring account of every step, sneeze, and fall. Every user input, every error, and every "oh, something went wrong, but I'll try something different" is meticulously recorded.
We approach this with a certain level of pedantry.
Not all entries are equal. We don't write every breath in our diary, right? So it is here. There are just information messages (INFO) - "Vasya logged in". There are warnings (WARN) - something like "the coffee maker broke, I'll have to make in a coffee pot". The system works, but already on guard. And there are cries of "SOS!" - these are errors (ERROR), when something went catastrophically wrong, and immediate intervention is required.
Context is the king. Finding the record "an error has occurred" is like finding a needle in the forest. But if the user's ID is attached to it, the parameters of his request and the transaction number are no longer a needle, but a whole beacon. We insist that every mistake comes with a complete dossier. It's just sacred.
Order instead of chaos. Previously, logs were just text. Now we are forcing them to be structured into neat JSON objects. It may sound boring, but believe me, when your analysis systems (like the ELK stack) can instantly index and sort this data, life becomes much easier. Searching becomes a routine instead of a quest.
We approach this with a certain level of pedantry.
Not all entries are equal. We don't write every breath in our diary, right? So it is here. There are just information messages (INFO) - "Vasya logged in". There are warnings (WARN) - something like "the coffee maker broke, I'll have to make in a coffee pot". The system works, but already on guard. And there are cries of "SOS!" - these are errors (ERROR), when something went catastrophically wrong, and immediate intervention is required.
Context is the king. Finding the record "an error has occurred" is like finding a needle in the forest. But if the user's ID is attached to it, the parameters of his request and the transaction number are no longer a needle, but a whole beacon. We insist that every mistake comes with a complete dossier. It's just sacred.
Order instead of chaos. Previously, logs were just text. Now we are forcing them to be structured into neat JSON objects. It may sound boring, but believe me, when your analysis systems (like the ELK stack) can instantly index and sort this data, life becomes much easier. Searching becomes a routine instead of a quest.
Monitoring: The pulse you constantly monitor.
Logs are history. Monitoring is live streaming. What's happening right now? How is the system's heart beating?
We look at it from two perspectives, so to speak.
The health of the "iron". This is the basic level. Are the processors overheating? Is there enough memory? Are the discs bursting at the seams? Boring, yes. But it's like checking a patient's blood pressure and temperature. There's nowhere without it.
And what about the logic itself? And this is the most interesting thing — application performance monitoring (APM). We're not just concerned with gigabytes, but with real business processes. How many milliseconds does it take to search for a product? What percentage of payment requests fail? How many transactions per minute are we handling? These are no longer just metrics; they're the heartbeat of the business.
To avoid getting lost in a sea of numbers, we use a combination of Prometheus and Grafana. Essentially, we create a customised "control panel" for our projects, similar to a spaceship. All the key indicators are right at our fingertips. It's beautiful, yes. And extremely useful.
We look at it from two perspectives, so to speak.
The health of the "iron". This is the basic level. Are the processors overheating? Is there enough memory? Are the discs bursting at the seams? Boring, yes. But it's like checking a patient's blood pressure and temperature. There's nowhere without it.
And what about the logic itself? And this is the most interesting thing — application performance monitoring (APM). We're not just concerned with gigabytes, but with real business processes. How many milliseconds does it take to search for a product? What percentage of payment requests fail? How many transactions per minute are we handling? These are no longer just metrics; they're the heartbeat of the business.
To avoid getting lost in a sea of numbers, we use a combination of Prometheus and Grafana. Essentially, we create a customised "control panel" for our projects, similar to a spaceship. All the key indicators are right at our fingertips. It's beautiful, yes. And extremely useful.
To sum it up, we need to say that:
Investing in monitoring and logs is not a "technical whim." It's strategic hygiene. It's the most reliable insurance policy. It provides simple yet incredibly important things: it minimises downtime (which means it saves money and face), reduces the time it takes to fix issues from hours to minutes, and allows you to scale based on clear numbers rather than guesswork. And most importantly, it allows you to sleep at night. I mean, you know that the system will wake you up if something goes wrong, and it will even tell you what it is.
Today, in this crazy digital race, stability is not just good. It's your main advantage. And it's provided by these quiet heroes who work in the shadows.
Today, in this crazy digital race, stability is not just good. It's your main advantage. And it's provided by these quiet heroes who work in the shadows.