Monitoring and Observability
Admin•
# Monitoring and Observability
You can't improve what you can't measure. Here's how to build truly observable systems.
## The Three Pillars
**Metrics**
Numerical measurements over time. CPU, memory, request rates, error rates.
**Logs**
Discrete events with context. Essential for debugging specific issues.
**Traces**
Request flows through distributed systems. Find bottlenecks and failures.
## Key Metrics to Track
**Golden Signals**
- Latency
- Traffic
- Errors
- Saturation
**RED Method** (for services)
- Rate
- Errors
- Duration
## Alerting Best Practices
- Alert on symptoms, not causes
- Make alerts actionable
- Avoid alert fatigue
- Include runbooks
**Tools**: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Honeycomb
Observability is not optional in production systems.