Foundation · 2 min
What you need to know
How do I know when my ecommerce store has a technical problem?
Use external journey checks and internal metrics, logs and traces to detect technical problems. Alerts should state affected customers or operations, severity, owner and the first diagnostic link.
What should ecommerce systems monitor?
Monitor availability, latency, errors and saturation for storefront, search, cart, checkout, APIs, databases, queues and providers. Add business signals such as payment success, order creation and inventory reservation consistency.
What is application monitoring?
Application monitoring tracks the health and behavior of store software, including request rates, errors, latency and important business actions. It shows whether the application is serving customers as intended.
What is error monitoring?
Error monitoring collects, groups and alerts on software failures and exceptions with useful context. It should remove secrets and connect related occurrences without treating every repeated error as a separate incident.
What is infrastructure monitoring?
Infrastructure monitoring tracks computing resources and services such as CPU, memory, storage, network, containers and database connections. It reveals capacity and platform failures that application messages may not explain.
What is application performance monitoring?
Application performance monitoring follows requests through code and dependencies to identify slow or failing work. It combines timings, traces, errors and resource context for important transactions.
What ecommerce errors should trigger alerts?
Alert on sustained failures or unusual changes in checkout, payment, order creation, inventory, search and customer access, plus exhausted resources and growing queues. Thresholds should reflect customer impact and require a defined response.
How do I detect problems before customers report them?
Run synthetic customer journeys from outside the platform, watch leading resource and error signals and compare current behavior with normal baselines. Route actionable alerts before support volume becomes the detection system.
A quick store check
Choose one critical journey and confirm it has an external availability check, latency metric, error signal, trace and actionable alert.
Foundation · 2 min
Frequently asked questions
Are logs alone enough for observability?
No. Logs explain events, metrics show patterns, traces connect work across services and customer checks reveal outside impact.
Should every alert wake someone immediately?
No. Immediate alerts should require urgent action; lower-severity issues can create tickets or appear in scheduled reviews.