observability-design

To design observability for a new microservice, implement the three pillars: logs, metrics, and traces. Define the four golden signals—latency, traffic, errors, and saturation—and set up Service Level Objectives to track system health.

The four golden signals of monitoring are latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. Tracking these critical metrics helps you understand system performance and detect issues across your software services.

Prevent alert fatigue by following best practices to create actionable and meaningful alerts. Define clear SLOs and error budgets to ensure you only trigger incident response plans for critical system issues.

Define Service Level Indicators by tracking key metrics like API response time. Use these SLIs to establish Service Level Objectives and error budgets, creating a clear chain to govern system reliability.

In observability, logs provide discrete event records, metrics offer aggregated numerical data, and traces map the end-to-end journey of requests. Combining these three pillars provides comprehensive visibility into system behavior.