Table of Contents
The Three Pillars of Observability
Modern observability is built on three pillars: Metrics (quantitative measurements over time), Logs (event records with timestamp and context), and Traces (request flow through distributed systems).
Golden Signals Framework
Google's SRE book recommends monitoring four golden signals: Latency (response time), Traffic (requests per second), Errors (error rate), and Saturation (resource utilization). If any signal exceeds thresholds, you have an actionable alert.
Alert Fatigue Prevention
Alert only on conditions that require immediate human action. Alert on SLO violations, not on symptoms. Group related alerts. Define clear runbooks for every alert. Review and tune alerting rules monthly.
FAQ
What is the difference between monitoring and observability?
Monitoring answers known questions (is CPU above 90%?). Observability allows you to answer unknown questions by exploring your system's behavior through rich telemetry data.
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