[mmanciop]

> How are metrics helpful? There is so much fun that could be had in setting up an actually resilient system instead.

Metrics are the means to an end of alerting. And with alerting, I mean getting pinged on my phone when something important breaks. Like, you know, the server going down.

> Why worry over metrics and alerts when you could orchestrate an infrastructure that grants you the superpower of being able to spin up a server with a copy of the world on a whim instead (or even a system that auto-starts one whenever there is demand)?

As somebody who has run cloud and enterprise software for almost two decades now, I can be that needs monitoring too. The more moving parts there are, the more things go wrong. The more things go wrong, and the more you care they get fixed, the more monitoring you need :-)

[strogonoff]

Do you really need to be urgently made aware that it’s down, if the system could simply spin up a new container and keep on as it were? You could still see that it had to do it, and if in the mood investigate it, but the matter of first importance is taken care for you.

> As somebody who has run cloud and enterprise software for almost two decades now, I can be that needs monitoring too

To be clear, I strongly believe that if you run anything seriously in production, you must monitor it—but first you need to be able to spin it back up with minimal effort. It may take a while to get there if you just inherited a rusty legacy snowflake monolith that no one dares to breathe the wrong way near, but if you are starting anew it is a bad mistake to not have that down first considering how straightforward it is nowadays.

Then, for hobby projects of low criticality (because people in this thread mistakenly assume I mean any personal project, I have to reiterate: nothing controlling points of ingress into your house or the like), you may find that once you have the latter, the former becomes optional and not really that interesting anymore.