So monitoring and profiling are pretty similar in what sort of things they tell you, but the meaningfulness tends to feel higher due to the programming model. Here's a fairly recent blog post giving an example from someone trying the BEAM for the first time, coming from the JVM - https://medium.com/@mrjoelkemp/jvm-struggles-and-the-beam-4d...
But when it comes to remote debugging, and more specifically, a general "I want to understand what is happening in production", the ability to attach a REPL, alongside your tools, is amazing. I can insert a breakpoint, sure (if I for some reason built my production instance with debug info), but just as easily (without any debug info compiled in!), and more usefully, I can query actor state, mailboxes, etc, fire a message to a process to see what happens, etc...all the things you'd get with a REPL running locally in your dev environment, basically. Do stuff like query for internal state for a process, then call a function with it to see what happens to the data, all in isolation from the normal execution flow (since immutable data gives you a degree of safety to actually run that live code, with copies of the live data, and see what happens). I can even remotely load new code, if I want, effectively allowing me to deploy a hotfix without taking the node down. And I can do all of this in prod. All of this is, of course, super dangerous, but with great power etc etc.
But when it comes to remote debugging, and more specifically, a general "I want to understand what is happening in production", the ability to attach a REPL, alongside your tools, is amazing. I can insert a breakpoint, sure (if I for some reason built my production instance with debug info), but just as easily (without any debug info compiled in!), and more usefully, I can query actor state, mailboxes, etc, fire a message to a process to see what happens, etc...all the things you'd get with a REPL running locally in your dev environment, basically. Do stuff like query for internal state for a process, then call a function with it to see what happens to the data, all in isolation from the normal execution flow (since immutable data gives you a degree of safety to actually run that live code, with copies of the live data, and see what happens). I can even remotely load new code, if I want, effectively allowing me to deploy a hotfix without taking the node down. And I can do all of this in prod. All of this is, of course, super dangerous, but with great power etc etc.