Raphaël: Hey, and welcome back to our series on ECS methodology. Last time. We talked about communicating with users this time, we're going to talk about tools that you can use to monitor your systems and hopefully prevent crashes. You will do everything you can to make sure that your system doesn't crash, but eventually it probably will. You can't fully guarantee the stability of a complex system.
But you can take steps to make sure you quickly identify problems, recover from them and learn from your outages. Previously, we talked about Kubernetes, and if you chose to go down that path, your managed Kubernetes provider probably gives you something along the lines of the Kubernetes dashboard. Using it, you can quickly understand if you have any services that are down or are experiencing some issues.
You should probably also have done things like configure liveness probes to make sure that your services are restarted if they do go down. Regardless of how you deploy your services. Most platforms have something roughly equivalent to that. Despite those, you want to make sure that you're alerted for any failures and that you have an easy path to diagnosing issues.
For this reason we strongly recommend using observability tools like new Relic, Datadog, or we've been trying out the BetterStack tools. They will give you the ability to be notified if anything, isn't running correctly. Lately we've been using BetterStack because we like the simplicity of their tools and we liked their billing model. But we've also used the other two, which are bigger, more complicated, but also really powerful.
We also find that at least some of them have more complicated billing models, which generally leads to less predictable charges. Datadog, for example, charges in part based on hosts, which doesn't necessarily correlate to the value we derive from them. But that might not be the case for your system. If you found this helpful, and you want to learn more about building software, check out the free PDF that we put together. Also a drop a comment.
If you have any thoughts about observability and monitoring. Follow us. If you want to keep up with this series, we have a lot more that we want to share with you. And we're constantly updating our process and learning from our experiences, our partners and our community. If you think we could work together, we'd love to chat with you and see if we can help with your next project. Thanks and see you next time.