Post by Picnic Technologies

Our warehouse app had been crashing silently for over a year and nobody knew. A watchdog process was restarting it every time, masking months of unstable hardware connections. When we upgraded it to be more resilient, we accidentally broke the only recovery mechanism that existed. Two failed deployments later, an entire warehouse at a standstill. The fix? A single REST health endpoint and some Datadog monitors. Suddenly we could see exactly which stations were healthy — and prove that the ones still failing had faulty cables and hardware, not broken code. Observability doesn't have to be a big project. Start with one question your app can answer about itself. Build from there. Read more in Eric George Smith's latest blog post in the comments!