Observability Implementation

You can't fix what you can't see

Most teams have monitoring. Few have observability. The difference is whether you can debug a novel failure at 2 AM without deploying new code. We build observability platforms that give your engineers full visibility — metrics, logs, and traces — unified, correlated, and actionable.

10x
Faster mean-time-to-resolution
85%
Fewer alert storms
99.9%
SLO compliance rate
60%
Less time debugging
The Foundation

Three pillars. One unified picture.

Metrics, logs, and traces each answer a different question. Alone, they give you fragments. Together, correlated by trace ID and timestamp, they give you the complete story of every request through your system.

Metrics

Know what's happening right now

Metrics are the quantitative pulse of your infrastructure. CPU saturation, request latency, error rates, queue depth — numeric signals that tell you whether your systems are healthy or heading toward failure. Without metrics, you're running production blind.

Tool Ecosystem

PrometheusGrafanaThanosMimirDatadogVictoria Metrics

What It Reveals

  • Resource saturation before it causes outages
  • Latency trends across services and endpoints
  • Error rate spikes correlated with deployments
  • Capacity forecasting for infrastructure planning

Logs

Understand why it happened

Logs are the narrative record of what your systems did and why. Structured logs, correlated across services, turn a wall of text into a searchable timeline. When metrics tell you something is wrong, logs tell you what went wrong — the stack trace, the failed query, the malformed payload.

Tool Ecosystem

Grafana LokiElasticsearchFluentdVectorDatadog LogsOpenSearch

What It Reveals

  • Root cause of errors with full stack traces
  • Audit trails for compliance and security
  • Cross-service request correlation
  • Anomalous patterns in application behavior

Traces

Follow the request end-to-end

Distributed tracing maps the full journey of a request as it crosses service boundaries. When a checkout request is slow, tracing shows you exactly where the 400ms latency lives — the downstream API call, the database query, the serialization step. Without traces, debugging microservices is guesswork.

Tool Ecosystem

JaegerTempoOpenTelemetryZipkinDatadog APMDynatrace

What It Reveals

  • Latency bottlenecks across service boundaries
  • Dependency maps generated from real traffic
  • Failed spans pinpointing exact failure points
  • Performance regression detection per deployment
Alerting Strategy

Alerts should inform, not exhaust

Alert fatigue is an engineering crisis. When your on-call engineer receives 500 alerts per day, they stop reading them. The real incident gets buried in noise — and customers find the outage before your team does. We fix this.

The Alert Fatigue Problem

500+ alerts per day

Team ignores all of them

No severity tiers

Everything is P1, nothing is P1

Symptom-based alerts only

Woken up for non-issues at 3 AM

No runbooks attached

On-call engineer guesses what to do

Static thresholds

False positives during traffic spikes

The Structured Alerting Approach

Tiered severity model

P1 means real customer impact — nothing else

SLO-based alerting

Alert on error budget burn rate, not raw metrics

Alert routing and escalation

Right person, right channel, right context

Runbook automation

Every alert links to resolution steps

Dynamic thresholds

Baselines adjust to traffic patterns automatically

SLOs & Error Budgets

Measure reliability the way your customers experience it

Service Level Objectives turn vague uptime promises into measurable contracts. An SLI measures a real user experience signal. An SLO sets the target. An error budget tells you how much failure you can tolerate before your users notice. This is how Google, Netflix, and every serious platform team manages reliability.

SLI

Service Level Indicator

The metric you measure. Successful requests divided by total requests. P99 latency under a threshold. The quantitative signal of user experience.

SLO

Service Level Objective

The target you commit to. "99.9% of checkout requests succeed within 300ms over a 30-day window." Concrete, measurable, and tied to business impact.

Error Budget

Acceptable Failure

The inverse of your SLO. At 99.9%, you have a 0.1% error budget — roughly 43 minutes per month. Spend it on deployments, experiments, or incidents.

slo-dashboard.grafana.internal
Checkout API HEALTHY
SLISuccessful responses under 300ms
Target99.9% over 30 days
Error Budget43 min downtime / month
Search Service HEALTHY
SLIP95 latency below 200ms
Target99.5% over 30 days
Error Budget3.6 hrs degraded / month
Payment Gateway BURNING
SLISuccessful transactions / total attempts
Target99.99% over 30 days
Error Budget4.3 min errors / month
Notification Service HEALTHY
SLIDelivery success rate
Target99.0% over 7 days
Error Budget1.68 hrs failures / week
Technology

Tools we deploy and operate

We're tool-agnostic. Whether you run open-source Prometheus and Grafana or enterprise Datadog and Dynatrace, we configure, tune, and integrate it into a cohesive observability platform. We pick what fits your scale, your budget, and your team's capacity to operate.

Prometheus

Metrics

Grafana

Visualization

Datadog

Full Stack

Dynatrace

APM

Jaeger

Tracing

OpenTelemetry

Instrumentation

Loki

Log Aggregation

PagerDuty

Incident Mgmt

Case Study

E-commerce platform reduced MTTR from 4 hours to 12 minutes

E-Commerce & Retail

The Challenge

A mid-market e-commerce platform serving 2M monthly active users had no centralized observability. Every incident required SSH-ing into individual pods, tailing logs manually, and correlating timestamps across six microservices by hand. Mean-time-to-resolution was four hours on a good day. During their holiday sale, a payment processing failure went undetected for 47 minutes — costing an estimated $380K in lost transactions.

Our Approach

We deployed a unified observability stack: Prometheus and Grafana for metrics, Loki for centralized log aggregation, and Tempo with OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing. We instrumented all six core services, built SLO dashboards for checkout, search, and payment flows, and implemented tiered alerting with PagerDuty integration. Every alert was tied to a runbook.

Results

12 min

Mean-time-to-resolution

95%

Fewer false-positive alerts

47→0

Minutes of undetected outages

$380K

Revenue loss prevented

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Monitoring tells you when something is broken — a dashboard turns red, an alert fires. Observability tells you why it's broken and where to look. Monitoring is predefined: you decide what to watch in advance. Observability is exploratory: you can ask arbitrary questions of your system after the fact. A fully observable system lets you debug novel failures you've never seen before, without deploying new instrumentation.
Datadog is a strong platform, but having a tool and using it effectively are different things. Most organizations we work with have Datadog deployed but lack proper instrumentation, meaningful dashboards, SLO definitions, or alert hygiene. We help you get full value from Datadog — or augment it with open-source tools like Prometheus and Grafana where that makes more financial sense at scale.
For a typical Kubernetes environment with 10-30 microservices, expect 6-10 weeks for a production-grade observability stack. Week 1-2 covers assessment and architecture. Weeks 3-6 cover instrumentation, metric collection, log aggregation, and tracing integration. Weeks 7-10 cover SLO definition, alert tuning, dashboard creation, and team training. You'll see value within the first two weeks as we surface metrics and logs that were previously invisible.
Implementation costs depend on your environment size, tool choices, and data volume. Open-source stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo) have zero licensing costs but require engineering effort to operate. SaaS platforms (Datadog, Dynatrace) have per-host or per-GB pricing that scales with your infrastructure. We help you model both options and choose the approach that fits your budget and operational capacity. Most clients see a 3-5x return within six months through faster incident resolution and reduced downtime.
High-cardinality metrics — like per-customer or per-endpoint breakdowns — can generate millions of time series and destroy your Prometheus or Datadog bill. We implement cardinality controls at the instrumentation layer: metric relabeling, recording rules for pre-aggregation, and careful label design. For environments that need high cardinality, we deploy purpose-built backends like Mimir or Victoria Metrics that handle it efficiently.
Yes. We integrate with PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and custom webhook endpoints. More importantly, we design the routing logic: which alerts go to which team, escalation timelines, severity classifications, and automatic runbook attachment. The goal is that when an engineer gets paged, they have full context — the alert, the dashboard link, the runbook, and the relevant traces — before they even open their laptop.
Serverless and event-driven systems require a different instrumentation approach since there are no long-lived processes to scrape. We use OpenTelemetry to propagate trace context through Lambda functions, SQS queues, and event bridges. Metrics are pushed rather than scraped. The three pillars still apply — you just need different collection mechanisms for ephemeral compute.

Technology Partners

AWS Microsoft Azure Google Cloud Red Hat Sysdig Tigera DigitalOcean Dynatrace Rafay NVIDIA Kubecost

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