The first monitoring request on most projects is a dashboard. The first thing that helps is a log file you can grep.
Structured logs, one JSON line per event, with request IDs, answer the questions that come up in week one: who hit this endpoint, what failed, how slow was it. No infrastructure, no vendor, no dashboard project.
Dashboards earn their place later, when you know which metrics matter. Building them first means guessing, and guessing produces beautiful charts nobody checks.
The order that works: logs first, alerts on the few things that page someone, dashboards last. Observe now, instrument when you know what you're looking at.
