As systems grow in complexity, traditional monitoring approaches break down. You can’t alert on everything — you need to understand what matters.
The Three Pillars of Observability
Metrics
Metrics give you the health of your system at a glance:
- RED metrics (Rate, Errors, Duration) for every service
- Saturation signals for critical resources
- Business metrics that correlate with technical health
Traces
Distributed tracing connects the dots across service boundaries:
- Every request gets a trace ID from ingress to egress
- Sampling strategies balance cost and coverage
- Traces link to logs for deep debugging
Logs
Structured logs are your safety net:
- JSON output with consistent field names
- Log levels used meaningfully (debug, info, warn, error)
- Centralized storage with retention policies
Our Stack
We’ve standardized on a proven open-source stack:
- Grafana — Unified dashboards and alerting
- Prometheus — Metrics collection and querying
- Tempo — Distributed tracing backend
- Loki — Log aggregation
Practical Advice
Based on our experience, here’s what actually matters:
- Start with metrics — they answer “what’s broken?”
- Add traces — they answer “where is it breaking?”
- Add logs — they answer “why is it breaking?”
- Invest in dashboards that tell a story
- Keep alerting simple and actionable
Observability isn’t about collecting all data — it’s about having the right data when you need it. A well-designed observability stack reduces mean time to resolution and gives your team confidence to deploy frequently.