What should developers monitor to ensure operational efficiency in microservice applications?

Monitoring server latency and response time is crucial for ensuring operational efficiency in microservice applications. Microservices often interact with one another over the network, and latency in these communications can significantly affect the overall performance of the application. By keeping an eye on response times, developers can identify bottlenecks in service interactions and optimize their code and infrastructure accordingly.

Additionally, response time is a direct indicator of user experience. If microservices respond slowly, it can lead to degraded performance and user dissatisfaction. Monitoring these metrics allows developers to take proactive measures to enhance the responsiveness of their applications, whether that's through optimizations, scaling, or other adjustments.

Network bandwidth, while important, does not provide a complete picture of application performance since it doesn't account for how long operations take to complete. User interface speed is also significant but is more about client-side performance than how the backend services are operating. Meanwhile, monitoring storage size is essential for managing resources but does not directly relate to the efficiency of microservice interactions or user experiences. Therefore, focusing on server latency and response time is paramount for effective management and improvement of microservice applications.