Monitoring & Observability

Application performance monitoring (APM) that tracks response times, throughput, database query performance and external API latency — giving teams the visibility to identify and fix performance bottlenecks before they become outages.

• Response time tracking per endpoint: p50, p95, p99 percentiles
• Throughput monitoring: requests per second by endpoint
• Database query performance: slow queries identified and quantified
• External API call latency and error rate
• Apdex score: percentage of requests meeting performance threshold
• Trace visualisation: full request lifecycle across services
• APM agent deployment: New Relic, Datadog or open-source (Sentry, Jaeger)
• Performance regression detection between deployments

Error and exception tracking that captures every unhandled exception in the application — with full stack traces, user context, affected environment and the ability to see if an error is new, recurring or resolved — so engineers can prioritise and fix issues quickly.

• Error capture with full stack trace and context
• Sentry integration for web, mobile and server-side applications
• Error grouping: same errors grouped regardless of user or time
• New error alert: immediate notification for first occurrence
• Error frequency alert: spikes above normal error rate
• User impact: how many users affected per error
• Release tracking: errors attributed to the deployment that introduced them
• Error resolution workflow: assign, investigate, mark resolved

External uptime monitoring that checks the application from outside the infrastructure — simulating what a user experiences — with immediate alerting when a service becomes unavailable and historical availability data for SLA reporting.

• HTTP uptime checks from external monitoring nodes
• Check frequency: every 1 minute for critical services
• Multi-region checks: verify availability from EU locations
• SSL certificate expiry monitoring with advance warning
• Page load time monitoring alongside availability
• Immediate alert on status change: down within 2 minutes
• Alert channels: email, Slack, PagerDuty, SMS
• Uptime report: availability % per period for SLA reporting

Centralised log aggregation that collects logs from all services and infrastructure into one searchable system — so engineers can correlate events across services, investigate incidents with the full log context and set alerts based on log patterns.

• Log shipping from all services to central log store
• Structured logging format (JSON) for reliable parsing
• Log store: Elasticsearch, Loki or managed (Datadog, Papertrail)
• Full-text log search across all services and time periods
• Log-based alert: alert when error pattern appears in logs
• Log retention policy: balance cost and investigation capability
• Audit log separation for compliance and security logs
• Kibana or Grafana dashboard for log visualisation

Automated backup configuration for databases, file stores and configuration — with tested restore procedures, point-in-time recovery capability and geographically redundant backup storage. A backup that has never been tested is not a backup; restore testing is part of the setup.

• Database backup automation: daily full and continuous WAL or binlog
• Point-in-time recovery capability for databases
• File store backup: S3 versioning or scheduled snapshot
• Cross-region backup replication for disaster recovery
• Backup retention schedule: daily 7 days, weekly 4 weeks, monthly 12 months
• Restore procedure documentation and runbook
• Monthly restore test with validation of restored data
• Backup monitoring: alert if backup job fails

Security hardening of the cloud infrastructure — TLS certificate management, firewall rules, SSH access controls, intrusion detection and CIS benchmark compliance — reducing the attack surface and ensuring the infrastructure meets the security baseline expected by enterprise customers and audit frameworks.

• TLS certificate automation: Let's Encrypt with auto-renewal
• TLS configuration: TLS 1.2 minimum, strong cipher suites, HSTS
• Firewall rules: close all ports except required, source-limited
• SSH hardening: key-only authentication, no root login, fail2ban
• VPN or bastion host for administrative access to private resources
• Intrusion detection: CloudTrail / audit log anomaly alerting
• CIS benchmark compliance scanning
• Patch management: automated OS security patch application