As software engineers, we are highly focused on user experience, and delivering the most value for our customers. Monitoring our software as it runs in the real-world is at the heart and soul of understanding and continuously improving it. But why is so much of our monitoring centered around I/O patterns, memory usage, and unhandled promises?

There are more important things to measure than the memory usage of your containers. Companies like Instagram and Netflix have long shifted their focus to user-related metrics such as overall likes on posts and hours watched. It’s time we too aspire to measure ourselves using better metrics reflecting the value we are creating for our users.

This talk will discuss the next level of monitoring, the one that matters most: user activity and business metrics. There’s a lot we can learn from such data, and it can be used by on-call devs, for new app versions, new feature planning, and more.

First, we’ll cover the theory of what matters most, examine real-world cases and discuss concrete advice on how to get started. Then we’ll go through some of the tools you can use and how to choose them wisely. Finally, we are going to debunk the myth of how hard this process is.