# Monitoring Reference

DigitalOcean Monitoring is a free, opt-in service that lets you track Droplet resource usage in real time, visualize performance metrics, and receive alerts via email or Slack to proactively manage your infrastructure’s health.

The [DigitalOcean API](https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/index.html.md) lets you manage resources programmatically with standard HTTP requests. All actions available in the control panel are also available through the API.

[`doctl`](https://github.com/digitalocean/doctl) is the command-line interface for the DigitalOcean API. It supports most of the same actions available in the API and DigitalOcean Control Panel.

The [DigitalOcean MCP server](https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/mcp/index.html.md) lets you use natural language prompts to interact with DigitalOcean Insights features, including uptime checks, alert policies, and metrics across droplets, apps, and other resources.

[DigitalOcean Monitoring API Reference](https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/api/digitalocean/index.html.md#tag/monitoring): Use the DigitalOcean API to programmatically retrieve metrics and configure metrics alert policies.

[doctl compute volume](https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/doctl/reference/monitoring/index.html.md): The sub-commands of doctl monitoring manages monitoring on your account from the command line.

[DigitalOcean MCP Servers](https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/mcp/index.html.md): MCP tools for managing DigitalOcean monitoring features.