Know the knowns. Explain the unknowns.
Monitoring verifies known conditions via curated dashboards and alerts. Observability exposes enough internal signals to answer new, unanticipated questions—vital for distributed systems.
Practical Model: MELT
- Metrics — RED/USE, SLI queries, percentiles.
- Events — deploys, feature flags, incidents.
- Logs — structured, sampled, correlated.
- Traces — end-to-end latency & spans with OTel.
Alerting That Scales
- Alert on symptoms (SLO breaches), not every component metric.
- Group, route, and dedupe in Alertmanager; attach runbooks.
- Use error budgets to pace releases when reliability dips.
SEO Keywords Targeted
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Key Takeaways
- Adopt OTel to unify signals across services.
- Define SLIs/SLOs first; alerts follow from them.
- Correlate deploy events with spikes to reduce MTTR.
FAQs
Do I need traces? If you run microservices, yes—traces reveal cross-service latency you can’t see with metrics alone.
What’s a good starter stack? Prometheus + Grafana + Loki/ELK + Tempo/Jaeger + OTel collectors.