Monitoring and Observability
Introduction
A system you can't observe is a system you can't operate. Monitoring and observability
give you visibility into what's happening: metrics, logs, and traces that help you
understand system health and debug issues.
We'll set up Prometheus for metrics, Grafana for visualization, and structured logging
for debugging.
Why This Matters
Without observability, you're flying blind:
- Is the model serving traffic? How much?
- Are predictions slow? Why?
- Is the system healthy? How do you know?
- Something broke at 3am — what happened?
For ML systems specifically:
- Model performance might degrade over time (drift)
- Prediction latency affects user experience
- Input data characteristics might change
- You need to know when retraining is needed
Tasks
Hint: Use prometheus-fastapi-instrumentator