sre-monitoring-and-observability

The four golden signals—latency, traffic, errors, and saturation—are key metrics that measure system health. Monitor these across microservices and endpoints using Prometheus-style metrics like http_request_duration_seconds and http_requests_total to detect performance issues before they impact users.

Implement OpenTelemetry for end-to-end request tracing across services and structured logging for efficient log analysis. Together, they enable you to trace requests through your system and quickly pinpoint bottlenecks when diagnosing performance problems.

Define Service Level Indicators (SLIs) based on the four golden signals, then configure alerts with severity levels focused on symptoms rather than causes. This approach enables proactive issue detection and faster incident response across your infrastructure.

Yes, this framework applies across microservices, REST endpoints, batch jobs, and background workers. It collects latency, traffic, errors, and saturation signals uniformly, enabling consistent observability across your entire system architecture.

This framework generates SLIs, alerts, dashboards, and traces for end-to-end observability. It also produces RED/USE best-practice runbooks and incident response guidance, reducing diagnostic time from hours to minutes when issues occur.

Both are complementary. Prometheus metrics provide aggregate signals about system behavior; OpenTelemetry tracing shows request flow through distributed systems. Using both gives you both breadth and depth needed for comprehensive observability.