monitoring-plan

A monitoring plan for distributed systems requires defining SLOs, configuring the four golden signals, setting up dashboards, alerts, logging, tracing, and creating an escalation runbook to detect and communicate problems quickly.

The four golden signals—latency, traffic, errors, and saturation—are core metrics that an observability strategy uses to evaluate service health, define SLOs, and trigger incident-response alerts when performance degrades.

Defining SLOs and error budgets involves setting reliability targets for your service's latency and error rates, then applying those targets within your monitoring plan to govern alerting thresholds and on-call response actions.

Yes, this monitoring plan scales to services of any size, applying observability strategies like dashboards, tracing, and alerts equally to a single feature or distributed microservices so stakeholders can act fast.

The best way to structure alerts is to tie them directly to SLOs and error budgets, ensuring your monitoring plan triggers on-call escalation runbooks only when the four golden signals indicate actual user impact.

You need distributed tracing in your observability plan when diagnosing latency or errors across distributed systems, allowing your on-call incident response team to pinpoint failures via logs and traces before SLOs are breached.