Observability

Observability is how well you can understand what a system is doing from the data it emits, mainly metrics, logs and traces. Monitoring tells you when something is wrong, while observability helps you work out why, even for failures nobody predicted. Tools such as Prometheus, Grafana and OpenTelemetry support the practice, and service level objectives turn the data into alerts that reflect what users actually feel.

10 articles

15/05/2019 10 min read

Alerting That Works: Signal, Noise, and On-Call SLOs

Alerting That Works pages you for real user pain, not every small blip. Learn how to cut noise, tie pages to SLOs, and keep on-call load…
01/04/2019 10 min read

Error Budgets: Balancing Reliability, Velocity, and Product Risk

Error Budgets tell you how much failure you can spend. Learn how to balance reliability, ship speed, and…
25/02/2019 10 min read

SLOs for Backend Engineers: Defining, Measuring, and Enforcing Service Objectives

SLOs for Backend Engineers turn user pain into a clear number. Learn how to define, measure, and enforce…
20/01/2019 10 min read

SLIs Explained: Choosing the Right Service Level Indicators

SLIs Explained shows which signals match real user pain. Learn how to pick indicators for latency, errors, and…
10/12/2018 11 min read

Tail Latency: Why P99 Matters More Than Averages in Distributed Systems

Tail Latency is the slow slice users actually feel. Learn why averages lie, how fan-out multiplies delay, and…
05/11/2018 10 min read

P99 Latency Explained: Measurement, Debugging, and SLOs

P99 Latency Explained for engineers who own production SLOs. Learn how to measure the slow percentile, debug the…
25/09/2018 11 min read

Distributed Tracing: Following One Request Across Many Services

What is distributed tracing: the span and trace model, context propagation across services and queues, OpenTelemetry tracing and…
20/08/2018 11 min read

Metrics: Golden Signals, RED, and USE

Metrics monitoring for a distributed fleet: time series metrics (counters, gauges, histograms) the four golden signals, RED vs…
15/07/2018 12 min read

Logging: Structured, Centralized, and Searchable

Structured logging, log levels, centralized logging, and log aggregation: how a distributed fleet turns scattered events into one…
01/06/2018 13 min read

Monitoring and Observability: Knowing What Your System Is Doing

Observability vs monitoring, drawn honestly: what observability is as a property, the three pillars (logs, metrics, traces) the…