Borrow the calm
The practices behind the calm
The habits that show up in every story here, explained plainly. Each one makes observability work for you instead of against you, and links to the story that shows it in action.
Observability
What is observability?
Observability is the ability to understand what a system is doing internally based only on the signals it emits from the outside: its metrics, logs, and traces.
Golden signals
What are the four golden signals?
The four golden signals are latency, traffic, errors, and saturation.
Full answer, how to start, and the common mistake →
See it in action: The Dashboard That Told the Truth →
SLOs and error budgets
What is an SLO and an error budget?
A Service Level Objective is a target for reliability, such as 99.9 percent of requests succeeding over 30 days.
Full answer, how to start, and the common mistake →
See it in action: The Page That Never Came →
Symptom-based alerting
What is symptom-based alerting?
Symptom-based alerting fires on what users actually feel, such as high latency or error rate, rather than on internal causes like a single restart or CPU spike.
Full answer, how to start, and the common mistake →
See it in action: The Page That Never Came →
Data freshness
Why should a dashboard show data freshness?
Stale data that has stopped updating looks identical to a healthy flat line.
Full answer, how to start, and the common mistake →
See it in action: The Dashboard That Told the Truth →
Tail-based sampling
What is the difference between head and tail sampling?
Sampling keeps only a fraction of traces to control cost.
Full answer, how to start, and the common mistake →
See it in action: Tail Sampling Caught the One in Two Thousand →
Cardinality guardrails
How do you prevent a cardinality explosion?
Every unique combination of label values becomes its own time series, so an unbounded label like a user ID can create millions.
Full answer, how to start, and the common mistake →
See it in action: The Label We Did Not Add →
Canary releases
What is a canary release?
A canary release sends a new version to a small slice of real traffic first, running it beside the stable version.
Full answer, how to start, and the common mistake →
See it in action: The Canary That Caught It →
Runbooks
What makes a good runbook?
A good runbook is a short, specific checklist linked directly from the alert.
Full answer, how to start, and the common mistake →
See it in action: The Runbook That Worked →
Blameless postmortems
What is a blameless postmortem?
A blameless postmortem investigates how the system allowed a mistake, not who made it.
Full answer, how to start, and the common mistake →
See it in action: The Blameless Postmortem That Changed Everything →
OpenTelemetry
What is OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry is the open, vendor-neutral CNCF standard for generating and collecting telemetry: traces, metrics, and logs.
Unified observability
What is unified observability?
Unified observability keeps logs, metrics, and traces in one place, correlated by shared context such as trace IDs, service names, and Kubernetes labels.