Observability tools are only valuable if engineers actually use them. Build systems that provide actionable insights rather than overwhelming noise.

Golden Signals

Focus on latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. These four golden signals tell you everything you need to know about system health. Ignore everything else until you've mastered these.

Alert Budgets

Limit alert volume to prevent alert fatigue. Aim for fewer than 5 alerts per day per team. Each alert should require human action; if it doesn't, log it instead.

SLOs

Define Service Level Objectives tied to user experience. Monitor SLI trends to predict SLO violations before users are impacted. Make SLO breaches costly to incentivize reliability.

Auto-Runbooks

Automate common remediation steps. When an alert fires, the system should attempt self-healing before waking an on-call engineer. Document what worked for future incidents.

Ownership

Ensure each service has a clear owner responsible for its reliability. Ownership includes SLO definition, monitoring, on-call, and incident response.