This article explains the importance of monitoring WordPress sites to address performance issues and enhance user experience. It outlines what to monitor, including application code, infrastructure, and user metrics, and offers options like New Relic and OpenTelemetry for effective monitoring.

Observability in applications comes with instrumentation overhead, which can impact performance and resource consumption. A benchmark of OpenTelemetry in a Go application revealed a CPU usage increase of about 35% and some additional memory usage, while still maintaining stable throughput. For teams prioritizing incident resolution, the tradeoff for detailed observability is often justified, though eBPF-based instrumentation offers a lighter alternative for monitoring without significant resource costs.

Observability in applications introduces instrumentation overhead that can impact performance, particularly when using OpenTelemetry with Go. A benchmark comparing a Go HTTP server's performance with and without OpenTelemetry revealed a notable increase in CPU and memory usage, but maintained stable throughput. The choice of observability method should balance the need for detailed tracing against resource costs, with eBPF-based instrumentation offering a more lightweight alternative for high-load environments.