Introduction
Modern applications don't fail all at once. They fail gradually.
A payment gateway starts responding slowly. Database latency increases. Inventory checks take longer than expected. Customers begin to experience delays, but traditional monitoring often notices only after users have already been affected.
This challenge inspired me to build PulseGuard, a Java-based observability demo that uses SigNoz and OpenTelemetry to monitor the health of a simulated e-commerce checkout system in real time.
Instead of treating observability as something that only helps developers after an outage, PulseGuard demonstrates how dashboards, traces, metrics, and alerts can help identify problems as they emerge and provide a clear picture of system behavior.
