im trying to get better at debugging production issues faster. right now when something goes wrong i kind of just grep through logs hoping something jumps out, which works eventually but feels inefficient

curious what other backend devs actually check first. like do you have a mental checklist you run through? specific log patterns you look for? or do you mostly rely on monitoring/alerting tools to point you in the right direction?

our setup is pretty basic (node backend, postgres, some redis) and im wondering if im missing obvious stuff that would speed up the "wtf just happened" phase