Practice · Golden signals
What are the four golden signals?
The four golden signals are latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. Watching these four for any user-facing service tells you most of what you need to know about its health, which is why a trustworthy dashboard leads with them and little else.
How to get started with Golden signals
- 1 List each user-facing service and pick its main request path.
- 2 Chart latency (p50, p95, p99), traffic, error rate, and saturation for that path.
- 3 Put the four charts at the top of the service dashboard, above everything else.
- 4 Draw the SLO threshold on the latency and error charts so normal and abnormal are obvious.
The common mistake
What is the most common mistake with Golden signals?
Burying the golden signals under dozens of host-level panels, so the one chart that matters is below the fold during an incident.
See it in action
Dashboards Resolved calmly
The Dashboard That Told the Truth
When latency crept up, one dashboard showed the real story in seconds: a data freshness badge, SLO burn lines, and the one graph that mattered. The fix took longer to deploy than to find.