In the microservice architecture pattern, a distributed system runs on several different machines, where each service is a component or process of an enterprise application. Although using a microservice-based application has a lot of advantages, it can bring about major challenges as well. One such challenge includes how to monitor a distributed system; this is because each microservice is heterogeneous and independent in nature. This means that traditional monitoring approaches are not good enough.

Monitoring is a critical part of a microservice-based system. It involves knowing how to control it and to how make sure that software is reliable, available, and that it performs as expected. This isn't a particularly easy task.

As you may know, traditional APM tools that are suitable for monolithic applications are not suitable for complex distributed applications. However, there are APM tools currently available on the market that can be used to monitor a microservice-based application. We will discuss these tools in the following section.