Debugging the tool that’s meant to help you debug

Infra teams spend too much time maintaining their monitoring tools instead of working on the core product.

On top of keeping everything running, they often get stuck managing the observability pipeline itself, like patching exporters and troubleshooting dashboards. What’s meant to help them just ends up becoming another system to operate. It’s an operational issue we see quite often, even across big companies.

In this post, we’ll look at why it’s happening and what teams can do to break free from the never-ending debugging chain.

Observability isn’t supposed to take up your time

Prometheus is still the go-to tool for monitoring containerized workloads, and Google Cloud’s managed solution (GMP) aims to offer all of Prometheus’ benefits, like PromQL support and alerting, without engineers needing to operate it themselves.

But in practice, many teams still spend time maintaining the stack. That means keeping exporters running, managing scrape configurations, troubleshooting inconsistent metrics, and switching back and forth between logs and dashboards to figure out what broke... not in their product, but in their monitoring system itself.

Google’s own documentation stresses that the goal of GMP is to avoid that burden by providing a “stand-alone managed service for running and scaling Prometheus”, designed to run on the same infrastructure as Cloud Monitoring, with support for PromQL and integration into existing tools.

Yet some teams still manage Prometheus almost like it’s not a managed service. Plus, they have to deal with extra complexity from how it works with Cloud Monitoring and logging tools.

Teams need 24/7 managed observability

There’s a real opportunity here. Most teams aren’t looking for yet another tool — they just want fewer distractions. They want someone to take over operational responsibility for things like:

• Running and scaling the collector agents
• Configuring and triaging infrastructure alerts
• Keeping the ingestion pipeline alive
• Ensuring dashboards and metrics are available, reliable, and clean

That means a managed observability service that’s not just “hosted Prometheus” but also takes care of what happens when exporters stop working, data goes missing, or too many metrics come in during an incident.

With this in place, platform and infra teams can stop patching their tools and start focusing on the core product, like building reliable systems and bringing real value to end users.

Monitoring tools are supposed to help, not create more work. If your team is spending too much time fixing the observability setup, it’s a sign that something’s not right.

At Revolgy, we help teams set up and manage tools like this 365/24/7 so they don’t have to do it all themselves. This includes managing the collector fleet, handling infrastructure alerts, and performing necessary maintenance.

If your team is dealing with the same issues, we’re happy to help; just let us know.