The Quest Begins (The “Why”) Picture this: I’m huddled over my laptop at 2 a.m., eyes glazed, watching the metrics dashboard flash red like the Death Star’s super‑laser charging up. Our API is getting hammered by a burst of traffic from a misbehaving mobile client, and every request is punching straight through to the database. The DB starts to groan, latency spikes, and suddenly we’re serving 500s like they’re going out of style. I’d tried slapping a simple per‑process counter on each ...