Organizations that depend on distributed systems often write their applications in Go to take advantage of concurrency features like channels and goroutines (e.g., Heroku, Basecamp, Cockroach Labs, and Datadog). If you are responsible for building or supporting Go applications, a well-considered logging strategy can help you understand user behavior, localize errors, and monitor the performance of your applications.

If you could know information about your systems in advance, what would you choose to know? If there was a set of repeating behaviors that happened consistently before an outage, would you want to know what they were? This is the idea behind proactive monitoring – the switching of context from “reactive” monitoring to something that allows you to act before the problem arises. Here are some guidelines to help you get started with your customized solution.