My sense is that people continue to think that monitoring is hard mostly because it used to be. There are great open source tools and services available now to make both collecting the data and watching it pretty simple to set up.
Yes you need some customers, otherwise you have no data to look at. However, as soon as you have _any_ customers if you aren't looking at real data to decide what is important to do next you are essentially just guessing.
For a long time that's what we did because tracking what was relevant was just too hard. Now what I see in a lot of startups that are leading the pack is that they are monitoring everything whether they think they'll need it or not - then when they have a critical question the data is already there.
Yes you need some customers, otherwise you have no data to look at. However, as soon as you have _any_ customers if you aren't looking at real data to decide what is important to do next you are essentially just guessing.
For a long time that's what we did because tracking what was relevant was just too hard. Now what I see in a lot of startups that are leading the pack is that they are monitoring everything whether they think they'll need it or not - then when they have a critical question the data is already there.