🔗 Building distributed systems in Elixir: Part 3 — Process monitoring

What happens when a process dies in a distributed Elixir application? Instead of polling to check if a worker is alive, Elixir provides an elegant solution through process monitoring. This article guides readers through building a process monitoring system using the Process.monitor/1 function. It highlights how to receive notifications about process terminations without relying on supervisors or GenServers. Through practical examples, it demonstrates how to handle both normal exits and crashes effectively, ensuring that processes can monitor each other’s lifecycles seamlessly. By leveraging Elixir’s message-passing model, the author emphasizes that failure detection can be integrated into the communication flow of distributed systems, laying the groundwork for more resilient application architectures.

For real applications with multiple workers, it also outlines how to manage and track multiple processes using maps to correlate monitor references with worker identifiers. Ultimately, this part of the series sets the stage for exploring process links in the next installment.