observability-sre

Monitoring distributed systems requires collecting metrics, logs, and traces across services. Use Prometheus to scrape metrics, Grafana to visualize them, and OpenTelemetry to instrument applications for tracing. Define SLOs to set reliability targets, then configure symptom-based alerts on error budgets and key metrics to detect issues early.

Observability relies on three pillars: metrics quantify system performance over time, logs capture discrete events with context, and traces follow requests across services. Together they enable end-to-end visibility into system behavior, dependencies, and failure paths.

SLOs define reliability targets as error budgets—the acceptable downtime or error rate for a service. Track SLO compliance against Prometheus metrics, alert when you're consuming the budget too quickly, and use this to prioritize reliability work over feature development.

Yes. Prometheus collects and stores metrics; Grafana visualizes them and enables alerting. Add OpenTelemetry for tracing and structured logging to complement metrics, creating a full three-pillar observability foundation for detecting and responding to incidents faster.

Use symptom-based alerting tied to SLO violations rather than threshold alerts on raw metrics. Employ low-cardinality labels in Prometheus to keep cardinality manageable, and route alerts through incident-response playbooks that enable blameless postmortems and automation to reduce toil.