o11yparadise

An O11y Paradise series

Beyond the Dashboard

Real signals. Real engineering. Beyond the graphs.

Monitoring tells you something is wrong. This series is about what comes next: the investigation, the system design, the tradeoffs, and the operational decisions that make infrastructure reliable.

Each episode follows a problem past the graphs, into logs, traces, queries, and architecture. Episodes are technical, opinionated where the evidence supports it, and useful whichever observability tools you run.

EP 001

Your Dashboard Is Green. Your Users Are Still Suffering.

Infrastructure health and user experience are different measurements. Why a wall of green panels can sit beside a bad day for users, and how to measure from where users stand.

Reliability engineering · Logs, metrics, traces, and profiling · Incident investigation 6 min read

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EP 003

Your Kubernetes Pod Restarted. Now What?

A step-by-step investigation of a restarting container: pod status, termination reasons, events, previous logs, resource metrics, and traces.

Kubernetes and cloud-native · Incident investigation · Logs, metrics, traces, and profiling 6 min read

EP 002

OpenTelemetry Collects the Data. Who Makes Sense of It?

OpenTelemetry standardizes how telemetry is produced and shipped. Correlation, storage, and investigation are still architecture decisions you have to make on purpose.

OpenTelemetry · Observability architecture · Telemetry pipelines 6 min read

Topics the series covers

  • Observability architecture 2 episodes
  • OpenTelemetry 1 episode · Basics
  • Kubernetes and cloud-native 1 episode
  • Logs, metrics, traces, and profiling 3 episodes · Basics
  • Distributed tracing 1 episode · Basics
  • Incident investigation 2 episodes · Basics
  • Reliability engineering 2 episodes · Basics
  • Observability costs Coming later · Basics
  • Telemetry pipelines 1 episode
  • Observability as Code Coming later
  • AI and LLM observability Coming later
  • Infrastructure security Coming later
  • Production engineering and scaling Coming later

How an episode is built

Most episodes follow the same arc, so you always know where you are. Authors adapt it when a topic needs a different shape.

  1. 01
    The Signal What first indicated that something was wrong.
  2. 02
    The Problem What was actually happening in the system.
  3. 03
    Beyond the Dashboard Why the first monitoring view was not enough.
  4. 04
    The Investigation The logs, metrics, traces, and queries that explained it.
  5. 05
    The Engineering Decision The architectural or operational choice, and its tradeoffs.
  6. 06
    The Outcome What changed, and how it was validated.
  7. 07
    Lessons from the Field What other engineers can take away.

Where the evidence comes from

Episodes say plainly when an example is constructed or reproduced in a lab. Those are never presented as production incidents, and no customer story or benchmark is invented. When an episode uses a label, it is one of these.

Real incident
Drawn from a production incident the author worked on. Identifying details are removed.
Anonymized experience
Based on a real engineering experience, with names, numbers, and identifying details changed.
Simulated lab
A scenario reproduced in a test environment to show the technique. It is not a production incident, and any numbers are from the lab or illustrative.
Hypothetical example
A constructed example used to explain an idea. It did not happen to a real team.

Who writes it

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New episodes appear in the site's RSS feed, alongside new stories. Have an investigation worth writing up? Share it, or write to stories@o11yparadise.com.

Beyond the Dashboard | An O11y Paradise Series