monitoring

To establish observability for a new application, you install a baseline stack using Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, and Jaeger or OpenTelemetry for traces. You then wire in sample instrumentation and create a starter Grafana dashboard to visualize the data.

Defining SLOs and configuring actionable alerts requires establishing reliability targets across teams and integrating them into your monitoring stack. You create specific alert rules in your dashboards to detect latency, error spikes, and saturation during incidents.

Creating a Grafana dashboard with alert rules involves connecting your Prometheus metrics and Loki logs data sources, then configuring specific alert conditions. These rules monitor latency, error spikes, and saturation to trigger actionable alerts for incident response.

Yes, Prometheus and Loki are designed to monitor application performance and system saturation. Prometheus handles metrics collection while Loki manages log aggregation, providing end-to-end visibility when wired together with trace instrumentation in a Grafana dashboard.

Yes, reliable operations require integrated runbooks within your monitoring stack. The skill prescribes combining dashboards, alerting, and runbooks across teams to ensure structured incident response, performance optimization, and consistent reliability targets.

You need OpenTelemetry or Jaeger for traces because metrics and logs alone do not provide end-to-end visibility into request paths. Traces complete the observability picture by linking metrics and logs together to pinpoint latency sources during incident response.