What should I use for a production app with logs and monitoring?

For a production app, use a real observability stack rather than just print() statements.

Good default setup

• Logging: structured logs (JSON) to stdout
• Monitoring/metrics: Prometheus + Grafana
• Error tracking: Sentry
• Tracing: OpenTelemetry

Practical recommendations

If you want the easiest production path

• Logs: use your cloud/provider’s log aggregation
  • AWS: CloudWatch
  • GCP: Cloud Logging
  • Azure: Azure Monitor
• Metrics/dashboards: Grafana + Prometheus, or a managed alternative
• Errors: Sentry

If you want a simple, solid stack

• Logs: structured JSON logs with logging / structlog
• Metrics: Prometheus
• Dashboards: Grafana
• Tracing: OpenTelemetry
• Alerts: Grafana Alerting or Alertmanager

What to log

Log:

• request IDs / trace IDs
• user/session IDs only if appropriate and privacy-safe
• errors with stack traces
• slow requests
• key business events

Avoid:

• secrets, tokens, passwords
• huge payloads
• noisy debug logs in production

Best practice

• Log to stdout
• Use JSON format
• Include timestamps, level, service name, request ID
• Set up alerts for error rate, latency, and downtime

If you tell me your stack (Python/Node/Go, Docker/Kubernetes, AWS/GCP/etc.), I can recommend a specific production-ready setup.