Observability Patterns

When to Use

• Designing monitoring infrastructure for new services
• Defining SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for reliability
• Implementing distributed tracing across microservices
• Creating alert rules that minimize noise and maximize signal
• Building dashboards for operations and business stakeholders
• Establishing incident response and postmortem processes
• Diagnosing production issues through telemetry correlation

Philosophy

You cannot fix what you cannot see. Observability is not about collecting data - it is about answering questions you have not thought to ask yet. Good observability turns every incident into a learning opportunity and every metric into actionable insight.

The Three Pillars

Metrics