The Complete Guide to Monitoring and Observability

Observability is about understanding your system internal state from its external outputs. It goes beyond traditional monitoring.

The three pillars: metrics (Prometheus), logs (ELK stack or Loki), and traces (Jaeger or Zipkin). Together, they give you complete visibility into your system.

Define SLOs (Service Level Objectives) for critical services. Set up alerting on SLO burn rates, not arbitrary thresholds. Implement structured logging with correlation IDs for distributed tracing.