Observability

Monitoring, logging, tracing, metrics, and system observability.

Observability

The Four Golden Signals: What Every Service Should Monitor

Google's Site Reliability Engineering book defines four signals that, together, give you a complete picture of service health: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. Here's how to implement them.

Mar 20, 2026 7 min read

Observability

Log Aggregation at Scale: ELK vs Loki vs CloudWatch

Choosing a log aggregation stack is one of the highest-leverage infrastructure decisions you'll make. ELK, Loki, and CloudWatch each have different strengths. Here's how to pick the right one.

Mar 19, 2026 7 min read

Observability

Observability-Driven Development: Instrument Before You Ship

Most teams add instrumentation after something breaks in production. Observability-driven development flips this: you instrument code before it ships, so you can understand its behavior from the first deployment.

Mar 18, 2026 5 min read

Observability

Metrics Cardinality Explosion: How to Monitor Without Blowing Up Your Bill

Adding a user ID label to a Prometheus metric seems harmless. With 100,000 users, it creates 100,000 unique time series. This is cardinality explosion, and it will crash your monitoring stack.

Mar 17, 2026 6 min read

Observability

Distributed Tracing in Practice: From Instrumentation to Debugging

When a request spans five services and takes 3 seconds, logs alone won't tell you where the time went. Distributed tracing shows you the complete request path, timing, and failures across your entire system.

Mar 16, 2026 6 min read

Observability

SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets: A Practical Guide

SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets give reliability a language that engineers and business stakeholders can reason about together. Here's how to implement them practically, not just theoretically.

Mar 15, 2026 7 min read

Observability

Alerting That Works: Reducing Noise and Catching Real Incidents

Most alert systems page engineers too often for things that don't matter, and not quickly enough for things that do. Here's how to build an alerting strategy that your on-call team will actually trust.

Mar 14, 2026 7 min read

Observability

Structured Logging: Stop Grepping Through Unreadable Logs

Unstructured log lines are nearly impossible to search, aggregate, or alert on at scale. Structured logging transforms your logs into queryable data that actually helps you debug production issues.

Mar 13, 2026 7 min read